GALLERY | MANUELA PICÓ

MANUELA PICÓ

Painter

THE AURA OF THE TRUTH

Today a true artist is not an acrobat, nor is he a juggler or a simple crafty artisan.

Overall, being an artist, whether it is a composer, or a poet, is decided by his or her capacity of conviction. A good politician will persuade with anything but an artist needs to have assumed the importance of his trade and his honest connection with it. This will yield a great capacity for conviction always measured by the degree of its seduction. He who doubts will generate a sense of anguish in us, whereas the person who believes in what he is doing will create in other a positive feeling. In other words: it gives us reinforcement and health.

That whole and genuine health is the kiln where the ceramics created by Manuela Pico are baked. This paintings, so humble representing what already has been seen on the other hand offer a never ending vision, culminating with an added dose of truth and love. A deeper and soothing vision, in which one feels in a valley of peace.

The objects that this honest painter chooses to paint are not an exact reproduction of the preexisting, but rather they convey the importance of her first relationship. A love relationship on one side, and a devoted one on the other. It is the same. The object that will end up in a painting turns into a twin brother of the original, embedded in a new and unexpected soul. In a mystic way. Manuela Pico’s heart beating, feeling, showing us. She is convinced of her ancillary labor, turning us into happy devotes of her results.

There is by no means Photoshop, filigree, or any mannerisms in the whole of her work. Neither there is improvement or esthetics for the bystanders. Whatever it is exposed is everything within the object. What you see is what you get; in its primary condition. A thing, a vase, an amphora will have a new spectacular image. Now transported into the painting it will not be a more or less useful object to be used as a tool, but an enchanted form of a useful tool.

Looking like the original this magic distinguishes the object with a new aura. And it is here, inside that aura, where we find the painter, the artist, the magician, the germinal artist. She is so genuine in whatever she paints that she has the capability, not only to seduce us as observers, but to improve us as her admirers. We are privileged onlookers of an art that can transform mud into gold, ceramic into light, and the picture of anything into one unthinkable experience of beauty and blessings.

Vicente Verdu
Sociologist, journalist and painter
Director of El Cultural of the newspaper El Pais.