Time, Space and Memory 

Analyzing the work of David Manzur is a task of discoveries and inquiries that involve finding demanding particularities at various levels of meaning, associated with the artist's visions, and, definitely, with a wide range of personal and professional interests; of religious and metaphysical concerns presented in a universe by the imagined spill on canvas and paper. Scenarios of universal dramas populated by human characters, animals, objects, where each one seems to be the vision of Genesis, the birth of something that the artist does not manage to reveal to us. His themes escape from chronological time to pass into the territory of an abstract time that plunges into past and future to transform into figurations that possible presents in the Essence and Being of painting; at the same time of intimate figurations, of thesis and antithesis: loneliness-fullness, sadness-joy, fantasy-reality, strength-fragility, freedom-confinement, of enigmatic nature and transcendent spirit, of a reality of art and human in triple action: the personal, the ethical and the aesthetic. His are contemporary urban narratives of fiction drawn from various sources that are transformed into the existence of an honest creator for whom art has been the reason for his long life. Each work by Manzur, with its own brilliance, breaks with the canonical rules of artistic-plastic creation, the most important being the establishment of an open cycle of communication between them, at the same time that each one has its own space and individual, but when analyzing them in the process of creation, this communicative cycle turns it into a "collective", that is, in a unique entity of visual proposal of formidable formalist aesthetic quality. They are theater scenes, where the characters narrate their own story, that of all human beings, an authentic life story that is expressed within a figurative universalism as opposed to a constructivist universalism. The artist moves away from the picturesque and the anecdotal, to reveal only the essential: a figuration in a universal dimension, without expressionist stridencies, but full of the vigor of a strong visual poetics, in some melancholic corner of a present that escapes. 

A career in art. The poetic character as a constant is present in his work from the beginning of his professional life as an artist. Having overcome the formative phase and the first works within figuration, she moves on to an interest in kinetic-optical proposals, this is the period that Marta Traba defines as the emerging decade in Latin American art. In this work Manzur allows himself to be enveloped by the spirit of non-figuration that expresses a subliminal poetic approach to the space in which he makes his characters "move", in the figurative form of theatrical majesty and the atmospheres that surround them, in the end incorruptible witnesses of the sunset, but, simultaneously, of the glory of existing. Manzur does not deny them an animistic character in their hieratic nature of Gods who inhabit an Olympus of abstractions. David Manzur belongs to the lineage of the great figurative painters of Colombia. Together with them, a continuous historical period of telluric characteristics in a planetary sense begins, without this being interpreted as primitive realism of the local earth and cosmos. Without foreign currentisms, following only his creative instincts, he is closer to contemporary conceptualisms of prodigious humanistic charge that reaches classical transcendence. The plastic-aesthetic expression of his work of art seems to be simple, it can be to a simple analysis of its values, but the depth of the proposal infers non-alienable creative principles of the true work of art, the one that is created to be valid in all the times.By skilfully handling the various visual languages recorded in the history of important moments of universal artistic creation, with meticulous archaeology, he has created a narrative of unique and personal figurative territories, of deep meanings, sometimes reaching metaphysical thematic approaches.

 One life, one art, one man 

David Manzur, unrepentant traveler, has a life to tell, extensive in age and in experiences full of adventures and existential vicissitudes; we do not doubt, also of encounters and disagreements, of contradictions and certainties, but where there have been no doubts it has been in the professional and personal security to carry out a work closely linked to his own Being. Painter, engraver, draftsman, interested various artistic disciplines and non artistic: theater, music, history of art and civilization, photography, literature, religion (Catholic, studies with the Claretian Fathers), astronomy (interested in Jules Verne, studies at the Institute of Sciences of Chicago), has served as a master teacher in art education workshops in which he has trained several generations of artists; In conclusion, he has led his life and his art towards the fullness to find his themes as the mystic who pursues an approach to God. The titles of the works are long and explicit on the subject: Las Meninas, Las Ciudades Oxidadas, Obra Negra and many more. He was born in Caldas, Colombia in 1929. As a child he moved with his parents to Bata, Equatorial Guinea in Africa. From here he begins a journey that takes him to Spain, and as his interests grow, he visits various cities in Europe, experiences the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, circumstances that, together with his time in music , literature and his passage through theater (albeit brief but successful), will mark the way of approaching the figure and space in representational plastic codes, as well as many of the exciting themes that have marked his production. From Europe he travels to the United States of North America. In New York he experiences the heyday of abstract art, studies at the Art Students League and the Pratt Institute; in Chicago (1966), he is assistant to the neoplasticism, optical and kinetic artist, Naum Gabo, whose influence is noticeable in his works from the sixties and seventies, when he experiments with wood, wire threads, in assemblages in which the play of lights and shadows create virtual volumes. From this stage, he returns to his beginnings as a figurative painter, a normal characteristic of graduates of the art schools of the time throughout this continent. After the period of long transhumance, for creative rest he settles in his native country, where he still resides in his ninety 

The work 

For David Manzur, “drawing is the essence of thought”, and it is precisely his mastery and excellence in drawing that is the basic structure of his work. The nourishing sources of his genius have been many and varied, resulting in a work of multiple meanings that contains the universal history of art. Deeply studying the classical periods, he has appropriated the spaces, times and forms of the Spanish baroque, of North American realist painters, as well as of the Renaissance and other trends, to generate an unprecedented work in which a phenomenology of the human condition marks his figuration with Las Meninas by Velázquez, with the work of Paolo Ucello, Rembrandt, Zurbarán, in situations that determine a systematic observation and the planned study of the chosen theme, be it horses, rusty urban landscapes or the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. They are realities from the formal andthematic to the conceptual and emotional, rigorously posed in atmospheres of unsuspected intimacy, in situations of meanings and signifiers: form and space complement each other in artistic substance under the solidity of chiaroscuro that generally submerges the surface of the work in a certain gloomy wave, reinforced by the force of the line and the forcefulness of the virtual volumes on the plane. In Manzur's proposals, one must know the background of the educated man, solid in his knowledge and in his existential experiences, as well as aware of the tools he uses to architect the complex composition of each work. The handling of the flat space that houses the virtually volumetric figurative forms is a consequence of the skill of the artist, while the meanings correspond to his intellectual skill and an imagination fueled by the magic of creative delirium.

 An exposition 

The set of works presented at the Duque Arango Gallery, many from private collections, should be considered a brief anthology of the production of Manzur, an artist who has worked nonstop since he was very young, experimenting with form on flat support. Although works from some periods are missing, the tour of the exhibition informs about important themes and moments through which he has gone through in his life as an artist from 1973 to 2022. It is a very varied selection that shows works from the series of The Rusty Cities , Los Caballos, Las Meninas, musical instruments, still lifes, and some very beautiful paintings with female characters; In short, a quantification of the production of this Colombian artist would yield information of incredible proportions. David Manzur, with his work, delivers to the viewer and to history the art of Latin America, the greatness of man's commitment to his life, his art and this continent, especially his native Colombia, always the cradle of his roots. His vast culture and complex personality make him one of the most complete creative plastic artists in Latin America