The painting of Manolo Millares from the negative aesthetics of Adorno

Abstract

The paths taken by art and aesthetics sometimes intersect, even despite themselves. Thus, it may happen that a theorist like Adorno, who was not exactly a friend of abstract art, the one that finds a kind of embodiment of his negative aesthetics in a painter like Manolo Millares, whose body of work was developed in the territory of informal abstraction. We are going to work on this hypothesis here, to see to what extent the Canarian artist's work can respond in his paintings to certain aspects of Adorno's negative aesthetics. This would be the case within his concept of "authentic art" as "negation", close to Millares' will to "destroy", or of the paradoxical position where both place art in the second half of the 20th century, between the need to give a testimony and the impossibility of communicating both so much horror and so much violence.