MANOLO MILLARES SALL (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1936 - Madrid, 1972). "Fallen man", 1968. Ink on GVARRO paper. Hand signed and dated. Signed, dated and titled on the back. It has slight horizontal folds, not very noticeable due to the intense black colour of the piece. Measurements: 37 x 33 cm; 53 x 49.50 cm (frame). Millares, definitely ascribed to informalism, at the height of his production, which is at its most creative between 1968 and 1969, develops an extraordinary drawing work, where his capacity to carry out a work similar to that developed in his harpilleras, but now without any material resource, entrusting everything to large extensions of black, is very striking. His work is like a "silent scream", expressive but silent, denouncing, powerful and dramatic, in which the gesture takes precedence, and strength and thought are valued. "My art is a slap in the face of death to justify life". He works intensely with paper, always in constant evolution, with great expressive creativity, vigorous in gesture, with dark tones, which mutate in works with a predominance of black. In this work we perceive as a background his high esteem for Francisco de Goya and especially for Francisco de Goya and especially his black paintings, which are undoubtedly at the root of his work, as well as his interest in automatic calligraphy, as we can see in the upper part of the painting where, by means of calligraphic games of illegible writings, the date of the work, 1968, appears. Co-founder of the El Paso group in 1957, Millares began his career in the Canary Islands, imbued with the surrealist atmosphere developed around Óscar Domínguez. His work revolves around two essential concerns, which in reality are one and the same: surrealism with its interest in the subconscious and the primitive, and the deep roots of disappeared cultures, specifically those of the Guanches. Self-taught, Millares made his individual debut in 1945 at the Círculo Mercantil in Las Palmas, and after four years experimenting with surrealism he decided to focus his work definitively on abstraction. In 1951 he took part in the I Bienal Hispanoamericana de arte, held in Madrid, which marked his definitive encounter with contemporary artistic reality. That same year he held his first exhibition on the peninsula, at the Jardín galleries in Barcelona. From then on he held exhibitions and participated in group shows in Spain, Cuba, Brazil, France, Germany and the United States, among other countries. In 1955 his work took a fundamental turn, which would mark a before and after in his language, and which took place around the discovery of sackcloth as a support. Thus, he left behind the works influenced by the pictographs of the Canary Islands, the result of his interest in surrealism and archaeology, and began to use sackcloth as an element that he added to the surface of the painting, together with other materials such as sand, ceramics or wood. For the artist, the sackcloth is an evocation of the cloth with which the Guanche mummies, discovered by Millares in the Canary Island Museum, were wrapped. It was also in 1955 that he settled in Madrid; there, under the influence of Burri, sackcloth became a support, the essential element of his works. Two years later he joined the El Paso group, in which he played a decisive role. Millares exploited the possibilities of sackcloth to the full, tearing, tearing, perforating, sewing and re-sewing it, thus extolling the value of the material as a vehicle of expression. His palette is reduced and becomes sober, with the ochre of the sackcloth and the colours black, red and white predominating. Abstraction is replaced by a recognisable figuration and the work acquires, even through the materials it is made of, a social and moral nuance. Until the mid-sixties black was the main colour in his work.