Destroying to rebuild, with that apparent nonchalance and optimism typical of those who know that only from the new a message of life and regeneration can be born. Manu Alguerò, a Spanish artist, but also a fashion designer with a 360-degree view of the world. He made his very personal fires crackle, making sure that the fruits of the pyrotechnic hazards are deposited on the paintings, then he passes not only the brushes, but also his fingers, directly on the pictorial surface impregnated with the unusual amalgam of color and dust, mixing it where it is necessary, and making figurations emerge, as in a surrealist game which remind the tradition that belongs in Catalonia to that genius of bizarre invention that was Salvador Dalì. There is much more in the faces and bodies that Alguerò tears from the shapeless matter: for example, the sense of the density of the earthy colors typical of the master of the Informal Antoni Tàpies (born a hundred years ago also in Barcelona) , and the African-American sign of the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who, between primitivism and chromatically bright expressionism he has certainly exerted a profound influence on the young European. But, beyond the comparisons with famous artists, what is most striking in the works of Manu Alguerò is the elegance of the line with which the artist circumscribes the representations, articulating the shapes suggested by the strength of color with fluidity and elegance. Fifteen paintings with explicit titles - "Catalina", "The Power of Red", "Behind the Poker Face", "Groove On I", "Explosion", or "Reunion de Amigos" - now represent the latest developments in Forte dei Marmi of Alguerò's research, in part already presented in recent months always at Oblong, but in the Dubai office. Here, then, is the "pacification" between the destructive violence of the artist and the stylist's calligraphic inclination. In fact, the Catalan painter composes the dualism of his creative flair: on the one hand that of the man deeply touched since adolescence by the activity of his family, owner of a demolition company; on the other hand, that of the esthete, capable of transforming even what belongs to the strictest everyday life into beauty. He himself remembers how as a child he was deeply moved to witness the explosion that accompanied the demolition of entire buildings. Debated between old and new, past and future, Manu Alguerò has therefore embraced the way to implement the reconciliation of extremes: erasing tradition, making a clean sweep of conventions and preconceptions, and following the path of a rebirth that opens the doors of tomorrow thanks to the ductility of matter, raped and gutted in its occult potential and, like a Phoenix, ready to rise again, to face new challenges: pictorial and human.