The brush was left outside the studio. Margharet paints with her hands, with sticks, with precision needles as fine as 0.25 mm, in a physical, almost ritual process that begins long before she touches the canvas, when she immerses herself in the place that is going to inspire her: its light, its history, its texture.
From a very young age she stood out at school for her ease with writing and the visual arts. At fifteen, her first contact with a more professional approach to art was through ceramics, which she studied at the Barcelona School of Arts and Crafts. From there she experimented, self-taught, with painting, sculpture and photography. That many-sided curiosity eventually won out, until she decided to devote her life entirely to art. Today she lives immersed in it, a passion she combines, day to day, with textile collecting and her love of antiques.
Margharet says that from childhood she knew she couldn't go without creating: any everyday situation ends up, sooner or later, turned into an artistic gesture. She understands abstraction as the freest way to express an emotion, stripped of narrative and figuration, and likes to imagine her canvases filling great open spaces, with views of the sea. Margharet continues to experiment with sculpture and photography, alongside a passion for digital art, and is especially fascinated by experimentation with fractal and generative art, as well as the proportions used in ancient classical art.
“I paint the way one embroiders: with my hands and the precision of the needle.”
The collector
For years Margaret Manzano has gathered antique textiles and has taken an active part in awareness campaigns to recover textiles and protect the Manila shawl in Spain, a garment to which she has devoted more than one public appearance. Her holdings include Manila shawls from the 19th and 20th centuries and singular pieces of every kind.
“What matters most is that a painting should envelop whoever looks at it.”
That same gesture, the one that envelops, the one that protects, runs through her large-format canvases in a different language: there are no recognizable figures in her abstraction, but there is a clear intention to embrace whoever looks at it, to surround them, almost to dress them in color and texture.