The exhibition Universo Alcorlo, an anthology of this painter’s entire artistic career, from his academic training during the 1950s to the present day, will be on display at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid until 8 March. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings, prints and artist’s books.
The sarcastic vein of Manuel Alcorlo’s painting has its roots in a mythical Spain, with antecedents in the art of the Aragonese Francisco de Goya and in the journalistic literature of Madrid’s Mariano José de Larra, as well as in our classic author of dreams, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Manuel Alcorlo, with the virtuosity of a figurative artist who masters drawing and spatial composition of variegated density, portrays a nineteenth-century bourgeois society of gentlemen in top hats and opulent, jewelled ladies of exaggerated physical volume. It is the phantasmagoric vision of a bygone era, but one that is still alive in much of the most reactionary Spain of the 21st century.
