Manuel Viola

José Viola Gamón, known by the pseudonym Manuel Viola, was a painter and poet born in Zaragoza in 1916. The son of a Catalan peasant, he was taken in by his grandmother and paternal aunts in Lleida at the age of six, where he completed his high school education.

In 1936, he moved to Barcelona to study Philosophy. There, he joined the artistic movement ADLAN (Amigos del Arte Nuevo), aimed at promoting avant-garde art, and co-signed the Manifesto of the Logicofobista Exhibition (phobia of logic) with art critic Magí Cassanyes.

When the Civil War broke out, Viola shifted from “surrealist revolution to surrealism in the service of revolution,” joining the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) as a militiaman in defence of the Republic. He served as a political commissar in a Republican army brigade, participating in the landing of Majorca and fighting on the Ebro front.

After the war, he moved with the remnants of the Republican army to France, where he continued fighting in World War II as part of the Resistance under the nickname Manuel. He was eventually persecuted by Franco's regime, the Vichy government, and the Nazis.

In 1940, he clandestinely relocated to Paris, where he engaged with various artistic circles aiming to reunite surrealist painters, sculptors, and writers dispersed by the war. During this period, he worked as an assistant in Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s studio.

In 1944, while in Normandy, Viola produced his first oil paintings and began evolving toward abstraction. He returned to Paris in 1945, participating in several group exhibitions with artists such as Hans Hartung and Francis Picabia. He met Laurence Iché, a translator, poet and model, whom he later married.

In 1949, Viola returned to Spain, settling in Torremolinos and becoming involved with Action Painting (gestural painting). He mounted his first solo exhibition in Madrid in 1953.

In 1956, the Claude Bernard art gallery in Paris acquired all his paintings.

In 1958, he joined the El Paso movement, seeking to connect Spanish painting with European trends. He became a leading informalist, initially working with a palette dominated by black and white, which later evolved to include a broader range of colours, particularly warm tones and contrasting greens and blues.

Viola moved to Madrid, where, with the support of Camilo José Cela and Eugeni d’Ors, he exhibited at the Galería Estilo.

In 1961, he settled permanently in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a village in the mountains of Madrid, where he started a family with María Asunción Arroyo.

His work continued to be exhibited, including major anthological exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid in 1971, and in 1972 at the Sala Gosé of the College of Architects in Lleida, the Palacio de la Lonja in Zaragoza, and the Sala Gaudí in Barcelona.

In 1980, his native city Zaragoza awarded him the Gold Medal.

Manuel Viola passed away on 8 March 1987 in San Lorenzo de El Escorial after a prolonged battle with lung cancer.

In addition to being a pioneer of abstraction in Spain, Manuel Viola is considered a decisive figure in the renewal of post-war Spanish art.

EXHIBITED WORK:

“Composition”, 1957
Oil painting