Scars of Resistance: Manolo Millares's Aesthetics of Negativity

Manolo Millares emerged as a key figure in Spanish Informalism during the 1950s, a time marked by Francoist censorship and repression. This article examines Millares’s complicated position during Franco’s regime, arguing that his focus on absence and materiality, analyzed through Adorno's negative dialectics, constituted a radical form of aesthetic protest. Millares utilized mixed media to create works that evoked themes of death and violence, yet transcended mere figuration. Millares’s innovative approach, characterized by the use of burlap and incisions on the canvas, challenged traditional aesthetic unity and formalism. By engaging with multiple forms of absence and non-identity, his work resisted subsumption into political or aesthetic narratives.