In Memory of Manolete, Who Died, 2019

The painting was made after a corrida commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the birth and the seventieth anniversary of the death of Manolete. It is not, however, dedicated to him alone, but to the memory inscribed in the ritual. In the culture of the corrida the arena remains a place where history is not recounted but continually relived.

The layered painterly matter and the interpenetrating forms build an image of memory – incomplete, fragmentary and alive. The work becomes a reflection on how an individual fate is transformed over time into myth, and how a personal history becomes part of collective consciousness.