Recently the artist's work has revolved around large-scale depictions of the human figure. His paintings are not portraits, nor can they be attributed to a specific place and time. While many of them show scenes of human interaction, their focus is not on narrative ideas, but rather on the sheer physical presence of the people depicted and the gestures they perform.
Read MoreAt the centre of this involvement is the tension between the materiality of the paint and the painterly possibilities on one hand and the physicality of the matter depicted on the other hand. The people he paint are not consistent wholes, neither on a formal level nor in regard to the sources they are based on: essentially, they are collages of photographic or digitally rendered stock imagery that was made to conform to a specific purpose. While these initial poses and gestures tend to have a stereotypical quality to them, it is through the painting process that a sense of oddity and personality may emerge which contrasts with the interchangeability of the source material. It is this state of limbo between representation and immediacy, between distance and intimacy in regard to the perception of the human body Manuel is interested in.
