Manuel Ángeles Ortiz

Manuel Ángeles Ortiz (Jaén, 1895 - Paris, 1984) is one of the key figures in the process of artistic renewal in Spain throughout the twenties and until the Civil War. It is a reference both for artists who travel to Paris and for those who work on the peninsula, mainly for their collaborations with the magazine Litoral.

From his first Parisian stay, Pablo Picasso's mark on his work is profound. His painting demonstrates the same alternation of languages ​​(late Cubism, line drawing and round and monumental volumes of classical inspiration, etc.), symptom of the different approaches to a return to the order promulgated by different voices, from Cahiers d'Art to Jean Cocteau or Amédée Ozenfant. On the other hand, friendship and professional ties with composer Manuel de Falla affect his work in two ways: the aesthetic appreciation of music and the strengthening of "the relationship between popular figurative tradition and modern art."

Considered as an artist of difficult stylistic classification, his work presents - from his independence - a strong experimental will and a complete rejection of abstract painting. Hence, surrealism is attracted to "his enigmatic lyricism, not his morbid aberrations of psychotic subjection," as he himself points out. All of this links with the tradition of the poetics of the original, developed by artists such as Benjamín Palencia, Ángel Ferrant, or Alberto Sánchez, but also by Paul Klee, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi.

The persistence of the landscape and the human figure from the fifties, coexists with turns that lead to the compositional analysis (La casa de los Dávila, 1957; Geometric head, 1960; Tribute to El Greco, 1975; Albaicín, 1982). In this way, he creates some works in which he combines lyricism and construction and that, without underestimating the role of painting, could place him within the limits of Informalism.