Manuel San-Payo
The exhibition Caminho da Montanha, Caminho do Deserto by Manuel San-Payo brings together drawings and paintings from a period that goes from 2019 to 2023, strongly marked by a reflection on the mineral element, in its relationship with time, with the human and with the nature of drawing and artistic work.
If all of Manuel San-Payo’s work is essentially indebted to drawing in its evident graphic component, maintaining for decades a disciplined daily practice of drawing based on observation of everyday life, it is certain that even the abstract dominance of his work maintains a latent conflict with the figure and the apparent figuration, anchored in the stone. Moment of an essential, timeless cycle, the stone is an existential place/support, but also a stratigraphic record in which the temporal scale of the human and the universal dissolve.
Manuel San-Payo (Lisbon, 1958) has a degree in painting from ESBAL and a PhD in Drawing from FBAUL. He attended the International Academy of Art in Salzburg (Austria), where he worked with Mario Merz and studied drawing and painting of natural models with Georg Eisler. He took a specialization course in artistic engraving/ lithography with master Dževad Hoso in Sarajevo. He is a professor of Drawing at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon. He has exhibited regularly since 1981 and is represented in public and private collections, in Portugal and abroad. He is a founding member and curator of Galeria Monumental, in Lisbon.
Sem titulo, 2023
Pastel e carvao s/papel. 32 x23 cm.