Manuel R Surrealist

“The surrealist sculptor Manuel (originally Emmanouel R.) was born in Athens and that means a lot or someone, who carries from his birth, as one can see now in his art the inherent, element of pursuit of his expression in sculpture. He graduated in Greece and almost immediately afterwards devoted much of his time to travel coming this way in contact and acquaintance with different cultures. Since childhood he proved his artistic nature in painting, in music and mainly in sculpting in stone. Sculpture is his great love, it is the outlet of his restless mind, it is the way to express his deepest feelings and thoughts in his own combination of imagination and result. True-born Greek Manuel’s sculpture is colour, and colour was in ancient times basic component of sculpture, but also his technique and his themes, as one can see in his works for open space or for placing them on wall. Many of his works belong to private collections all over the word, mainly in the USA others are exposed in public buildings and at a permanent exhibition on the island of Mykonos. In spite of his study of ancient and modern great sculptors Manuel himself does not deny his admiration for Salvador Dali and many critics call him contemporary Dali because in his themes and many difficulty they obvious the influence of the great Spanish artist".
Tassos Georgiou,
Writer.
Mr Tassos Georgiou is eminent writer in Cyprus, Greece.

"We theorists (art critics) say that when a work of art reaches the exhibition hall, our discourse is redundant because the work is addressed to your senses and your contemplation. This is the desideratum which the creator strives for through his elaborate formulations in his works. In any case, we critics usually facilitate things by lighting a path; you can find your own walk on that path and your own way to approach and converse with that work of art, out of the thousands which a work of art propounds.

Manuel is a virtuoso artist, a “wizard” of marble, I would say. He knows marble like very few people do, but does not surrender himself to his facility with it. His idiolect is surrealistic, it yields fluid forms which are eternally in motion. He coils his forms around axes of symmetry with a lyricism and a sarcastic tone, with humour and, indeed, with a disposition towards illuminating the inner aspect of things, the anima rerum (the soul of things), like the Romans used to say.

He chooses different coloring styles and materials which are incompatible with each other: he combines natural rocks with metal; he combines glass with marble or solid pieces, materials through which the sculptor acts as a copper caster. There is a great difference between the two: the sculptor extracts volume until he gets to the final phase of the work; the copper caster designs and insists upon details, he passes his form on to wax (cire perdue is a very old method), he turns the wax upside-down, the wax’s place eventually being taken by copper. We say, then, that this creator insisits upon the Plastic Art and disociates marble sculpture from the philosophy of coper casting, that is, from approaching the material in order to give prominent details. Because, what else, if anything, does a work of art do other than express the style, the character, details, a dimension of life and ways of thinking?

Manuel combines both these technical methods because he has the ability to do so. He combines the perception of the marble sculptor (who perceives volume, knows the material’s grain, its durability, how to touch each material, how he will converse with it) with the philosophy of the copper caster, precisely because, as I said earlier, he has the facility to know the Plastic Art like few people do. He accentuates details, not to cause one to say “Goodness, how much he can achieve!” (because then the artist loses his meaning), but in order to give through these details a precision which creates in us a sense of certainty and security, while, at the same time, raising that sense through the dimension of surrealism; that is, he creates aspects of the outside world which are connected to mechanisms of our psychic hinterland. Because what, I wonder, does a conspicuous violin that twines mean? It is as if sound itself twines around its own axes. What, I wonder, do a face, a gesture, an eye or a facial caricature mean? They convey to us the sensation of a grimace that reflects the emotional state of an individual, of a persona, of a mask. (persona was a Latin term, denoting a facial mask through which inner reverberation can be heard.)

Therefore, Manuel, combining remnants from antiquity with human facial masks, with gestures, with musical instruments, with details which he enlarges and magnifies or which, at other times, he diminishes, gives us the microcosm and the Macrocosm which we carry around within us, the universe which, through the insights we have during our ruminations, we can sense we are a part of.”