‘Thus the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.’
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York, 1991, p. 67
Like a fine mathematical formula, Manuel Amado’s painting contains and assimilates all the major ‘classical’ currents of our century, in the sense the great Argan gave to that term, opposing it to ‘romantic’: rational, purified, light in anecdotal content.
The artist himself acknowledges drawing inspiration from 20th century painters who revived the classical legacy, lending it a new and unsettling meaning. Disenchanted with the experiments of Futurism, the ‘Metaphysicals’ searched, some more distantly (De Chirico’s meta-historic sphinx-art) and others more passionately (the more spatial, and hence more temporal, approach developed by Carrá or Casorati), for the way back to Mediterranean tradition.
Manuel Amado’s oeuvre could thus be defined as both metaphysical and atemporal, since these undeniable features of his painting are by no means less important than the main forces behind his extremely personal architectures: light and poetry.
The paintings’ space and few objects are all for the light and exist because of the light, which mysteriously covers them, without defining, without outlining them with the harshness that would be expected from their usual linear geometries, enveloping them in the luminous longing with which the light of the Ocean – a less anthropological, less chronological appellation than Mare Nostrum – composes its most hopeful verses.