MALAGA.- The CAC Málaga is presenting the first individual museum exhibition to be devoted to the Seville-born artist Manuel León. Entitled A World without Light, it is curated by Fernando Francés and features 32 watercolours and 10 canvases that focus on contemporary issues from both a critical and an ironic viewpoint. Influenced by the Baroque, Manuel León’s paintings depict penitents with their faces covered, of a type deeply rooted in Spanish popular culture, particularly during Easter Week. These figures allow the artist to camouflage sentiments and phenomena characteristic of today’s society, such as the crisis of moral values as well as the economic crisis. Deploying a highly defined style and a meditated use of colour, León’s paintings depict common gestures and poses but ones that acquire a different dimension through his figures: beneath the mask lies a more profound reflection on human beings. The artist’s intention is thus to draw our attention to every individual’s aspirations, fears and desires within the context of the present day. Manuel León lives and works in Seville.

“My two favourite avant-garde movements are Expressionism and Fauvism, but I also follow with interest the work of street artists such as graffitists, and that of the Old Masters”, explains Manuel León (born Villanueva del Ariscal, Seville, 1977) in relation to his work. The CAC Málaga is now presenting the first solo museum exhibition to be devoted to the artist. Entitled A World without Light, it comprises a selection of his most recent creations, including previously unexhibited ones, totalling 42 works: 32 watercolours and 10 canvases. The artist deploys a highly distinctive and personal style with influences from the Baroque in order to depict familiar characters such as penitents of the type seen during Easter Week in Spain. These figures are striking for two reasons: in addition to belonging to Spanish popular culture, their expressions and poses conceal a message that is critical of the situation of human beings in modern society.

For Fernando Francés, Director of the CAC Málaga, in the work of Manuel León we encounter “’Caravaggios’ reflecting on the risk premium, ‘Zurbarans’ discussing the effect of reduced bank lending on small businesses, “Valdes Leals’ demonstrating that corruption is nothing new but rather intrinsic to human beings and to all political systems and that no one has the right to cast the first stone, ‘Riberas’ opining on the American dream and on the devastating effects of the economic recession, [all of which] construct settings in which nothing is what it seems, although what it is seems is graudated by a light that makes it difficult to see the pared-down outline of the figure’s edges, thus deliberately diminishing the importance of the detail and shunning inappropriate idealisations, focusing rather on the pictorial value of key figures in order to decipher twists and turns, ins and outs and symbols through which the artist, like an illusionist, makes images that are not vital to discovering the key to each image disappear, while on the other hand he makes ones to which he attributes real significance appear. This process takes place within the context of the most absolute, Lutheran and reforming freedom and one devoid of any academic approach. It does not contradict the fact that the dramatized and exaggeratedly theatrical settings continually define contradictory aims on the part of the painter, who is both a traitor to tradition and the sharp-shooter of any idea that has the potential to be predictable.”

León uses penitents, most of them depicted with their faces covered, in order to ensure that any viewer can identify with such a figure. These figures’ poses and expressions in the paintings contrast with their role in real-life Easter Week, as we see in the watercolour Killing the Father (2008), in which the artist depicts a composition with a penitent holding a knife to Christ’s neck and a naked woman. León uses this metaphor to emphasise the moral and ethical crisis experienced by people today, which has a bearing on supposedly sacrosanct issues such as their religious beliefs.

In other works León focuses on the manipulation and corruption of power and its consequences. He once again uses the figure of the penitent, as we see in paintings such as Master of a World (2012), where this figure appears in a disturbing pose, looking at and touching a terrestrial globe and thus displaying a credible, demonstrable power over the world’s destiny. The same is evident in The Judgment of Variable Interest Rates (2014), in which one individual questions another in front of the attentive gaze of a sort of committee, which observes the final verdict with interest.

In The Blind leading the Blind (2014), León uses colour in an expressive manner characteristic of his most recent works in order to draw attention to the principal figures, while the landscape assumes a secondary role. The artist thus reveals his intention of emphasising certain actions undertaken by his Nazarenes. In some works we see a penitent with his face uncovered, as in Fran as Abraham (2014) or The True Prophet (2014). This is always the same person, with the only difference beings the expressions and bodily gestures. Another resource deployed by León is that of language: the titles of his compositions provide a context for his work and give it a meaning located between irony and social critique.

Manuel León was born in Villanueva del Ariscal, Seville, in 1977. He graduated in Fine Arts from Seville University and is a member of the Intervenciones en Jueves collective. León combines his work in painting with other art-related projects such as Capital and Territorio UNIA art. Notable among his solo exhibitions have been Summa contemporary at the Sala Matadero in Madrid with the Javier López gallery (2014); Cauno es Cauno at the Margarita Albarrán gallery in Seville (2007); Los árboles surferos, AUM.06, Fundación Coca-Cola Spain, in Seville (2006); and Pon un Manué en tu vida at Galería Matriz in Seville (2005). His participation in collective exhibitions has included those held at Málaga Arte Urbano Soho (MAUS) in 2013; Que vienen los bárbaros at the CAS (Centro de las Artes de Sevilla) in 2012, and Los Claveles. Una aproximación a los jóvenes pintores de Sevilla at the Fundación Chirivella Soriano in Valencia in 2008. Manuel León has received various awards, including the first UNIA Prize for Painting (2008) and the prize for Young Art and Creation awarded by the Instituto Andaluz de la Juventud (2008).