Chromatic perception

Chromatic perception Maliyel Beverido tr. Tiosha Bojórquez

Any landscape is a condition of the spirit Henri-Fréwderic Amiel

Javier M anrique’s recent paintings are the result of a landscape abstraction and synthesis process.

A landscape is a reading of the physical and aesthetical characteristics of the geographic space, but also of the intellectual and spiritual conditions that it awakens in its viewer.

Journey to hell Oil on canvas 2018

In abstract landscapes space is stripped of its representational qualities and all its visual constituents are synthetized to obtain its essence, an essence that Manrique suggests through fields of color.

Bull in the sea Oil on canvas 2000

Blue emotion Oil on canvas 2017

Here, the object of painting is not the image but the experience. Representation becomes secondary, even superfluous, and what comes first is the compositional and chromatic richness—or simplicity—through which the artist engages in the impossible task of showing his most intimate perception of things.

The abstract landscape doesn’t stop symbolizing a territory but, beyond a mere generality, this is a non-specific, non-identifiable one. If we think on geography as a notion rather than a fact, we’ll find ideal spaces in it or ones that have been sublimated through an economy of elements. By existing in a painting, those geographies are materialized.

Under the rain Oil on canvas 2017

Manrique makes an abstraction even of minimalism, until color dominates and articulates the way and the rhythm of the glance.

Through his work, Manrique says that there is a suggestion wherever there is an essence.

And, thus, forests, caves, skies, and soils are reduced to expressive brush strokes and droplets crashed against the canvass, or dripping down through it and creating profundity and vibration.

These paintings aim to spontaneously evoke immaterial places which attract towards the realm of the visible the invisibility of emotions.

There is no discourse guiding or limiting the viewer, just an incentive to mix those throbbing, stirring, shaking color areas with one’s own experience.

On ashes Oil on canvas 2018

Chromatic Perception is an invitation to interiorize space and to contemplate color and its subtle language.

Cold fire Oil on canvas 2019