There was a crowd on Tuesday October 20 at the Hôtel de l’industrie, Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris for David Manzur’s ephemeral exhibition, and in this crowd many Colombians. It’s no coincidence, David Manzur is Colombian and at 96 years old this is his first exhibition in France. Stanislas Couzi-Betancourt (the nephew of Ingrid Betancourt, whose imprisonment by the FARC between 2002 and 2008 had moved the whole of France), close to the painter, is very proud to say “that since the death of Fernando Botero in 2023, he is the greatest living Colombian artist”.
The biggest perhaps, but still very little known in France. This is why Stanislas Couzi-Betancourt enlisted the services of exhibition curator Edwart Vignot to organize a presentation of the artist’s recent works, a first step towards greater recognition in France.
“His painting is a form of magical figurationexplains Edwart Vignot, he is in a certain way an heir of surrealism”. “I didn’t imagine being so touched, he adds, perhaps because it is also a very musical painting”.
View of David Manzur’s exhibition at the Hôtel de l’Industrie.
©DR
Music is precisely the subject in a series of paintings representing women playing a musical instrument or holding a choir libretto. David Manzur is undoubtedly a figurative painter, even if sometimes the forms are a little enigmatic. The dark, earthy palette harkens back to Zurbarán.
Faced with these images, psychoanalyst Laurence Aubry offers another reading: “I am struck by these horses’ rumps invading the space, these women’s faces made up of a simple cavity and all these orifices reminiscent of infantile theories built on the vagina-anus-mouth analogy. It is a painting where the sexual impulse seizes the viewer”.
Eros but also Thanatos, in this Christ of Bojaya that Manzur painted in 2019 to pay tribute to the 80 civilian victims who died in 2002 in a church following a homemade bomb launched by the FARC guerrillas. Stanislas Couzi-Betancourt offered to donate it to the Center Pompidou, so that the National Museum of Modern Art preserves at least one work by an emblematic artist of his country and his era.
