Communication with the purpose of culturally promoting artists included in the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Collection, works protected by intellectual property rights. Their total or partial reproduction or processing by any means, or their transmission or cession in any form is forbidden without the authorisation of the holder of the rights to the works
Montaña Negra Nube Blanca 1
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Manuel Vilariño (A Coruña, 1952)
Title: Montaña negra, nube blanca (Black Mountain, White Cloud)
Year: 1999
Technique: silver gelatine on aluminium
Size: 110 x 110 cm (diptych)
Edition: 2/5
This work by Manuel Vilariño was acquired by the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation at Madrid’s 2009 International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO), and is part of one of the series of landscapes that brings together his interest in philosophical reflection and his permanent links between poetry and photography. This trend flows especially in this sequence of landscapes that he himself defines as “auroral” and that are closely connected to the thinking of María Zambrano, one of the literary torch-bearers of the Galician artist, looking into the interior of his own emotions.
This sublime piece has been part of important exhibitions, the last of which is the one touring Spain entitled “Seda de caballo” (Horse Silk), inaugurated at the Tabacalera de Madrid Foundation in 2013 and curated by the professor and art critic Fernando Castro Flórez. Here, Manuel Vilariño continues playing with and combining misty landscapes and ephemeral mists, a post-romantic tribute to the mystique of the purest nature, with a kind of intention drawing from the sublime Kantian that feeds on these constant evocations of lonely scenes. A composition involving silence, life and death, the journey or walk as a path to spiritual enrichment, between the dramatic and the lyrical.
With regard to these creations, the artist often speaks of his longing for beauty, of his inner need, which holds a nihilistic sense in his permanent gaze towards the world. Qualities that allowed him, among other things, to win the National Photography Award in 2007, where the jury especially emphasised the technical qualities and the intense poetic and philosophical feeling of his works, constantly reflecting on life cycles and the sense of time through different natural setting whose territories of the imaginary are always indivisible.