MANUEL FORTE – IS ANYBODY HERE?

JULY – SEPTEMBER 2024

The domestic interior is the central character of is anybody here?, an exhibition of paintings by Manuel Forte. The spaces that appear in these images are defined scenographically, using a conventional perspective. Most of these environments, therefore, unfold towards the background—just as with a sequence of rooms. Al- though Forte uses this projective tool to specify a very clear and precise spatial approach, he blurs it and renders it ambiguous, thus carrying figurative representation to the realm of abstraction. His strategy emerg- es from a mastery of the combination of lines, patterns, gestures, and colors in the different planes that articulate each spatial scene: an arrangement that can reveal a fascination with design and fashion, textiles, decoration.

In this exhibition Forte carries his interest in staging, present in his paintings, to an architectural scale. In the first instance, he has transformed a gallery wall into another of his pictorial planes—under his combinations, patterns, and colors—which adds to the ambiguity of his interior images by serving as support for several of the paintings. On the other hand, Camarão da Costa is a piece that manages to articulate a scene: Forte’s picto- rial work occupies a certain space and covers the surface of various everyday objects found there. The pattern that covers the scene in question comes from a painting that is central to the composition and that, together with a mirror, gives it depth, placing the viewer inside the image. is anybody here? would be the question that resonates, like an echo, in these spaces via their sequential environments or rooms that, apparently, are empty, devoid of the presence of human beings.

The image of each interior, as often happens when confronted with an unknown domestic space, can give rise to the meditation of a world, of a personality. Those objects that give orders as decorations can offer relevant clues. Nevertheless, these domestic spaces conceived by Forte resist being coherent in this sense and, for the most part, present some element that belongs to another constellation of things—such as a syringe, a leg of ham, a horse. The presence of these entities can render strange the scene and lead the imagination to differ- ent associations. This separates the artist’s work even further from a series of peaceful representations of the bourgeois interior. On the other hand, his paintings also stand out for cultivating a certain melancholy that is typical of images of the abandoned interior, without characters—where everything remains motionless as a record of a last human contact.

Daniel Garza Usabiaga