Self-Portraits: Inigo Manterola
I am Inigo Manterola and I was born in a village on the Gipuzkoa coast called Orio, almost 42 years ago. With an early vocation, I began to draw as a child and at the age of 8 I painted my first oil. Since then I have not stopped. Today I consider myself multidisciplinary, although where I feel most comfortable is between painting and sculpture.
Marked by my family’s trade on my father’s side (I am the son, grandson and great-grandson of fishermen), I soon became interested in the sea and its people. Harbor scenes, fishing boats and dinghies recur in my paintings, resolved in various ways according to the different stages I have burned through in my career. I am often asked to define my work or to pin it down. I do not like to talk about styles. Today I know where I am but not where my head will be in a couple of years. Generically, let us say that I feel comfortable in figuration and take it as the foundation on which I build different projects or abstract exercises. After each crossing I return to figuration. But that passage through abstraction leaves a residue in the figurative language, helping me to keep believing in what I do and encouraging me in my determination not to repeat myself. One of the dogmas on which I base my work is constant evolution.
Answering what art is for you is complicated. If we ask ten artists we will get ten different answers. The official version explains that it is the manifestation of human activity through which a personal and disinterested vision is expressed, interpreting the real or the imagined with visual, linguistic or sound resources. I would add that it is the result of the search for oneself, the waste produced along that road. I believe that every artist seeks to find himself.
My source of inspiration is nothing other than my construction (maturing) as a person. Starting from the context I have inherited, the fishing past of my father’s family and taking it as an excuse and a point of departure, my life is drawn. And this is reflected in the work. As an example, “CAMINO ENTRE DOS AGUAS, DE LA FIGURACION A LA ABSTRACCION” (A Path Between Two Waters, from Figuration to Abstraction), a 2005 project in which I started from the comfort of the known, figuration, in order to strip myself bare as an artist while I walked along various paths toward what until then was unknown, abstraction. This project coincided in time with the gestation of my fatherhood and was nothing other than the reflection of that gestation in my work. As in the project, I was entering terrain until then unexplored by me, seeking to create a parallel between abstraction and fatherhood.
Throughout my career, as in that of any other artist, periods of ebullition and creative drought have followed one another. At this moment I find myself in full ebullition, with many projects in my head, both pictorial and sculptural. This summer I have shown my latest paintings in Biarritz. In 2016 I am presenting, first at the Citadel of Pamplona and then in San Sebastian, a new project as yet unnamed, in which painting, sculpture, photography and an installation will be present, among other disciplines.
If I were asked what mark I aspire to leave on the world of the visual arts, I would answer that I could not care less. It does not interest me. I do not waste my time and energy on that. I only ask to be allowed to keep searching for myself, to show my waste and to live off it.
Contact details: www.enelestudio.com
– Self-Portraits: Inigo Manterola – – Home page: Alejandra de Argos –
