Manuel Barbadillo
El módulo como argumento
Manuel Barbadillo (Cazalla de la Sierra, Seville 1929 – Málaga 2003) is one of the most important names in the Spanish Normative Art, and a pioneer of Computerized Art, which he initiated in Centro de Cálculo de la Universidad de Madrid, along with other important artists such as Eusebio Sempere, José María Yturralde and Elena Asins. Barbadillo is the author of a series of texts about this art movement. He was also a founding member of the seminars on “Art and Computer” of the aforementioned Centro de Cálculo, as well as a member of the Computer Arts Society of London and a member of the Artistic Council of the “Gesellschaft für Computer Grafik und Computer Kunst” of Munich, among other positions.
A self-taught artist, he studied law and then made the decision to devote himself to painting. He travelled around Europe, North Africa and the United States, where he lived for some time. The works of his first period of creation, of an “informalist abstraction”, are of a great chromatic variation and a great formal complexity due to the use of elements and objects that are incorporated to the canvas. Since the 1960s, his works tended to the repetition of the same structures and forms, abandoning color until they practically became monochromatic.
By 1964, his incessant search for a rational and balanced expression led him to divide the canvas into areas to work with modules that he used repeatedly, exploring rhythms and applying symmetries, a system that would continue to evolve throughout his career. His work, then, is characterized by its great rigor and by the use of black and white in the majority of his production, only rarely alternated by the use of brown.
In this exhibition that we are now presenting, it will be possible to contemplate, mostly, works from the first period: canvases, drawings and pieces made with superimposed wooden elements compose this wide representation of his most characteristic and personal work. His later periods of creation are also represented with several works, both canvases and drawings.
