The House of Manuel Padorno, Punta Brava

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Historic sites

Desnudo en Punta Brava (1990) appeared in a national collection published by Hiperión, with his own drawing on the cover, and the well known linear self portrait as a frontispiece, constitutes an important landmark in Padorno's poetic career, as perceived by many of his readers. From his earlier poetic texts, we know that on their return to Las Palmas, the Padorno family lived in Ciudad Alta. Now, thanks to this book of poems, we learn about his definitive house in Gran Canaria, the “house of his life” which I feel is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful ones I have ever seen. A house that looked over the sea, in Punta Brava, at one end of Las Canteras beach –like a return to his adolescence–, a blue and white house, with a skyroof –the place where he painted–, a house in the middle of which light filters through to a large office, with tall glass bookcases, containing the very best of Canarian, Spanish, Latin American and Universal poetry, plus the most distinguished modern art, from painter-poets such as Schwitters to the well loved American abstract expressionists, which for Padorno –both the painter and the poet– constituted a lesson of intensity and containment. Many of the compositions are so memorable, that from 1989 onwards, the year he moved in to his house, it inspired that well known “nomad's house”, all about a nomad who came back for good, even though he might have thought otherwise, and should have left for good instead. Right here, in this diary of an adaptation –“the merciful region can be heard / how to learn how to hear everything once more”–, to once more become a “disciple of the sea” –the title of the second part of A la sombra del mar– with the moise of the waves at night, the light, Havanna rum, “a boat / in a blue blur, over the line / of the horizon”, the sun, a seagull “flying sleepily along, / etched in the air”, another “flying against the horizon”, a skirt in the evening, a barking dog, some clouds, the much remembered “childhood azalea”, the caterpillar crawling over the sand, the gymnasts, cyclists, a seafood hunter along La Barra reef... There is no shortage of tributes: in “Oyendo a Europa” to the very pure Edvard Munch –discovered on a trip to Norway, and the subject of several of his painted tributes from the urban Nomad series–, and in the “Effigy” to Mallarmé, walking along outside his number 89, rue de Rome. Also worth underlining is the approaches to the sense of the painting itself, done "half blind", from which he once again invokes Giotto.

Guía para una lectura de Manuel Padorno, by Juan Manuel Bonet

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