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“The sum of all individuals is what will truly produce results”. César Manrique.
Today is not just another day on the calendar. It cannot and must not be. We are to be congratulated, in celebration. On a day like today, 107 years ago, in a small house near the Charco de San Ginés, César Manrique Cabrera was born, the man who changed the history of Lanzarote forever.
Much has been written about the artist and the man. Technicians, scholars, and cultural researchers have interpreted from different angles the keys to a work as brilliant as it is immeasurable. Others, more mundane, have preferred to approach his human side, sharing experiences and anecdotes that reveal an intense life, guided by an overflowing and contagious passion.
Lanzarote is not today the same depressed territory as that in which Manrique was born. Nor is the island society. The island advances driven by technological development and the pressure of an economic model in constant transformation while activating the appropriate solutions for a dilemma that he knew how to anticipate: how to grow without losing its soul.
Manrique not only transformed the island landscape; he transformed our gaze. He taught us to see the island with the eyes of the heart. He painted with light and color a territory of blacks and ochres and returned to its inhabitants the pride of belonging. He made possible a future that many believed impossible through his Art, Culture and Tourism Centers and turned us into guardians of a way of understanding the harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature. He gifted us his way of conceiving progress based on balance with the natural environment and, above all, he made us responsible for transmitting it from generation to generation.
That is, probably, his most powerful legacy. Not so much the extraordinary that he developed in this territory that he turned into a living canvas, but the demand for a collective responsibility oriented towards the common good. A sum of wills that gains greater relevance in a world as turbulent as the one we have to live in. The greatest risk we face is to revel in Manrique's work while we move away from the ethical and aesthetic principles that made it possible.
To celebrate his/her birthday is an exercise of most just memory, but also of coherence, because the best way to honor his/her legacy is to be up to everything it implies: his/her work not only forms part of our past, but also defines the way in which we want to build our future.
Congratulations.
Ángel Vázquez Álvarez.
Councillor of the Art, Culture and Tourism Centers.
