Although for the most part abstract, the works of the autodidact Manolo Gómez visualise his attitude towards life and his milieu in a singular way. At times, says the artist, they show what it means to be a gitano. By means of contemporary resources, such as waveforms, abstract expression and dynamically flung paint, they seek to expressthe ancient emotions of the culture of theSpanish gitanos – for example, the inexplicablestate of duende that connects audience and artistin flamenco.
With good reason, Gómez’s works have been compared with the quejío, the specialised song form of cante fl amenco, which is reminiscent of a shriek. Although it is a product of a traditional culture, the concept of duende, with its emphasis on the active integration of the audience into the artwork, approaches the postmodern concept of the reader/receiver as author. In contrast to contemporaries who work figuratively, and who often illustrate flamenco performances in a decorative fashion, and hence run the risk of offering only a pale imitation of this serious culture, Gómez takes his own purified path, one that initially encountered misunderstanding, but which establishes an original form of access to abstraction, one that goes beyond classical modernism.
With his work Gómez succeeds in liberating flamenco from seemingly familiar forms of appearance. He endows this independent and serious culture with a convincing, lucid form, and renewed flamenco in the context of contemporary art.
