This artwork from the series Ancores a la Terra, transience, change, life, is evident. The trees appear like metaphoric anchors that stabilize or root a territory. But also, they emerge as a mutable condition referring to natural processes, as much as they do to human intervention. The tree tops seem to be created organically by the paint itself, acquiring lives of their own. Is it an allusion to the briefness, to the change, to the growth, to the perpetual evolution? Is it an allegory for fate, and for what is beyond the control of the artist? Whatever it may be, it coexists with a longing to be eternal -or at least enduring- fostered by the man who acts upon nature hoping to anchor it down, to make it his own; that is to say, the trees are the image of the continual change, but also emblematic of the human desire to remain. Heraclito and Parmenides remind us: "Panta Rei, Panta Esti"(everything changes, everything remains).
In the Ancores series, there are rows of similar trees appearing meticulously sowed by an invisible planter. In fact, sometimes they appear in such geometric patterns as to allude to, without a doubt, the presence of a skilled horticulturist. Miro often said that he worked like a horticulturist, perhaps because, like Tintoré, he planted seeds of his art that would create a life of their own. In this series the wishes and, above all, the choices the artist makes are added to the random process that govern the material and shapes on the canvas. Its capacity for variation, movement, as well as the potentiality and limitations, are positioned in the middle ground that we are describing: that which blossoms out between the horticulturist and nature, between the artist and his own work of art. Between change and permanence.
Critic text by Maria Dolores Jiménez Blanco
from catalog "Territories of oblivion - Manu vb Tintoré"
2015
All of this artworks are pure, stripped-down, in crisis and critical landscape, creating a dense and silent atmosphere, full of anxiety, mystery, degradation, vertigo. Landscapes that look at us from the silence, return our gaze as a mirror, reflecting our own nature of men and at the same time provide us, as Junichiro Tanizaki said in the Shadow Praise, " the sensation of a strange calm that transmits this darkness to us".
Manu vb Tintoré
