Lanzarote is a landscape of origins. Here the essential force of nature dominates supreme. The hand of the sun gives form and concreteness to the eye. The absence of light is darkness: a profound fear. Lanzarote is a hymn to the elements that make up the earth, the raison d'être of the senses on which fragile human intentions rest. Like ancient wills engraved on stone and destined for sunset. Lanzarote is an epistème and at the same time the very duration of the primordial substance. Life, in which sacred and profane are mixed in a dream of eternity.
It is impossible not to feel the echo of the spirit and works of César Manrique, the soul of the Canary Islands, a polyhedric artist: painter, sculptor, architect, ecologist, preserver of the artistic heritage, urban and landscape designer; a man endowed with the charisma necessary to convince his fellow countrymen to invest in tourism, without falling into the mistakes and horrors committed in other parts of the planet in the name of a development often only predatory and disrespectful of people and territories.
Lanzarote, the Island that also gives its name to this series, was decisive in his life and work, the source of much of his pictorial imagery, the landscape of his childhood experience and of enormous significance for his later perception of the world. It is also the place where he carried out most of his spatial interventions as well as the territory where he implemented a model of intervention that would define the current configuration of the island. It is to this man that these photos symbolically want to pay homage, and we at AntiVirus Gallery are pleased to host them in our space.
