"Huellas del paraíso". Manuel Velasco to Sala Parés.

The Sala Parés presents "Footprints of paradise" by Manuel Velasco.

On the final pages of The Map and the Territory (2010), Houellebecq has a vision. The future of the Ruhrgebiet appears to him like this: "From Duisburg to Dortmund, passing through Bochum and Gelsenkirchen, most of the old steel factories had been transformed into exhibition centers, shows, and concerts, while local authorities tried to establish an industrial tourism based on the reconstruction of the working-class lifestyle at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, the entire region, with its blast furnaces, its slag heaps, its abandoned railway lines - where freight wagons were just rusting -, its rows of identical and quite polished shanties, sometimes enlivened by factory gardens, looked like a conservatory of the first European industrial era. Jed had then been impressed by the threatening density of the woods that surrounded the factories after just a century of inactivity (...). Those industrial colossi, where the bulk of German production capacity was once concentrated, were now rusted, half in ruins, and vegetation was colonizing the old workshops, infiltrating between the ruins and gradually enveloping them in an impenetrable jungle."

The parallelism between this Houellebecquian foreboding and what materializes in Footprints of paradise is very evident: not only the landscape - nature, considered here as an allegory of Eden - seems to emerge spectrally among these backgrounds of oxide and paint so characteristic of both Manuel Velasco and industrial aesthetics - what better image of industrial decadence than the peeled paint on a door or a rusty sheet metal machine? - but the artist, who has his studio in La Marina del Prat Vermell, resignedly awaits in this former Barcelona industrial area, the inevitable demolition of the entire neighborhood, in decline since the sixties. Probably, the Ruhr factories will suffer the same fate: Houellebecq's is nothing more than a dream.

Eden behind the Tel, therefore, that's why the latest solo exhibition of Manuel Velasco at the Sala Parés was titled this way. Residue (2022) was a tough exhibition. The beginning of the series dates back a few years and arises at a difficult time both for the artist and for humanity: just a few decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, even larger walls rise - the one separating the Sahrawis from Morocco is over 2,700 kilometers long, the one in the West Bank, over 700... - but above all, and as a consequence of the emergence of new powers - and the consequent decline of the old ones -, a retreat movement, a mistrust towards foreigners and a defense of identity were forged in the Europe and North America of those years, which has ended up erupting, as we see, over the past few months. Manuel Velasco then began a work with iron dust - a material used in the steel industry and in the processing of agricultural products - which he is still developing. Initially, these rusted surfaces, occasionally perforated as if they had been hit by bullets, represented flags. The flag is undoubtedly the perfect symbol of this - in my opinion, perfectly useless, besides ethically doubtful - retreat to known positions. There is certainly bewilderment in the face of the global reconfiguration caused by globalization - that is, by the revolution of telecommunications - and lately I dare to say that those of us in the art world are fortunate - thanks especially to surrealism - to be familiar with the possibility of the strange; and with the unusual, incomprehensible, disorderly, irrational, or random. And also with the wonderful. Thus, Manuel Velasco, who undoubtedly saw the modern utopia threatened - Imagine there's no countries -, rebelled against walls and flags: he rusted them, scratched them, perforated them, thus achieving, perhaps unexpectedly, a poetics of extraordinarily efficient, sensual, and personal industry.

This artist, who in the early 2000s had taken advantage of new means to develop an interesting photorealism that focused on both the terrestrial and maritime landscape and the urban environment (paintings that were exhibited at the renowned Galeria Almirante in Madrid and at the prestigious Sala El Brocense in Cáceres, with prologues by Óscar Alonso Molina), reaches abstraction in the following decade and immediately begins to develop procedures that are closely related to those he currently uses. He was then working on wearing down the paint, adding and removing layers, scratching and lifting. Much has been written about these processes of accumulation and recovery; it is the mechanic of the ziggurat, the antecedent of the pyramid, the Tower of Babel, and, in a way, the encyclopedia: that construction that rises on its own ruins, that accumulates all the knowledge known within itself, and aspires to touch the sky because it gathers all known knowledge. In this construction eternally excavated by researchers, as in these paintings that seem like painted and worn-out walls infinite times and evoke abstract landscapes, each layer refers to a specific moment (in addition to participating in the construction of the final image): the painting refers to itself, explains the story of its making, and in doing so, builds a new image. Thus, there's the image, there's the landscape, but there's also the object painting, pure matter (probed). It is on this coexistence of "layers of reality" - essentially the illusory and the real - that Hoffmann bases his classic theory of modern art: it is present in medieval art - the codices with their narrative, their illustrations, their gold leaf letters, their filigrees - and returns with cubist collage, combining the painted scene with newspaper clippings and other objects.

All of this is said because Manuel Velasco, who, as seen, has always evolved around the landscape - Javier Hontoria dedicated a text to him, the great landscape specialist critic - and now returns to it in a truly elegant way, may be at the peak of his career. In these subtle, essential landscapes - with an unmistakable oriental scent -, minimal, which appear spectrally among the remains of industrial material, there is, in addition to the evidence of mastery in working with oxide and color - anyway, Manuel Velasco has always been very skillful with materials, he has invented various effective procedures -, a new and marvelous element: drawing. Lines that depict plants, forests, waters, and horizons while remaining lines or, to be more precise, strokes that, yet magically, evoke the appearance of a space, a world, beyond the metallic surface. An Eden, says the artist, perhaps saturated, like all of us, with a rampant developmentalism that leads nowhere (at best), and that in this allegory of industrial decadence - much more beautiful, in this sense, than Houellebecq's - takes the form of hallucination.

There are many more things in these beautiful paintings, too many to be explained - when an artist reaches maturity, he can no longer account for the number of elements that make up his work: the imprints we leave - the metaphor of which are the scratches, but also these drawings on paper made with the oxidation of metal objects -, which have always obsessed the artist; the shadows and reflections; the world's tragedies - "painting for harsh times," he tells me -; the love for nature; the terrible climate issue; and Tanizaki, and El Bosco, and Dürer... To the formalist, in any case, only these dim and suggestive atmospheres that matter are created by matter when it is allowed to be, and these minimal, wise, simultaneously organic and geometric drawings: it is the naturalness with which they arise and build the scene that guarantees that the painting is right. We do not know what will come after the industrial civilization based on fossil fuel burning, but, whatever it is, it is already here, anticipated.

Javier Rubio Nomblot