Manuel Antonio Domínguez_The pretender_09/09/18_10/29/18_Dossier

The Galería Ángeles Baños opens its new season with “El Pretendiente” [The Pretender], by Manuel Antonio Domínguez, his third solo show in our space.

Manuel Antonio Domínguez (Villablanca, Huelva, 1976) is one of the members of hisown generation who has most intensely focused on a drawing practice. His drawings are realist and feature highly-detailed technique, with clearly defined lines that are thencomplemented by watercolour, gouache or collage; colour is always held in check. His work is also characterised by drawn interventions on found objects, such as magazine covers, press clippings and printed correspondence that he has compiled through purchases in street markets and second-hand shops. These objects are then altered with a highly personal style to give them new meaning and revived readings;sometimes they are done subtly, while sometimes they are handled in more blatant,perturbing ways.

Manuel Antonio Domínguez’s work is found within what we might call “gender discourse”. For years he has been interested in analysing the questions that affect theunderstanding, construction and collective evaluation of male roles. In these works,however, for the first time ever he openly takes on the female figure, with special attention paid to single women. His work is focused on revising and interpreting forms that are immutable, sexist or patriarchal, and which have appeared in relation to this subject in our most immediate context.

The interest of this proposal lies above all in the virtue of being able to multiply every gender position the gaze might allow, and in its capacity to make a more specific historical analysis of the idea of a certain woman’s right and wish to be alone as well as live alone. Domínguez once again offers his own position on the negative interference we are subject to under heteronormative masculine domination, offering current images of identity and new models in the midst of diversity. These/his “new women” openly reject any association between being a single woman and social failure, identifying it more as the right to choose and as a natural evolution of theeconomic and family-related independence of women, as something that has beenforged over the past few decades. His women seem sure of themselves, they are even arrogant, as single women are highlighted in a new way in the context of their ownpersonal history.