Manuel Forner "Hize"Spain / International

About

Abstract painting built from the hidden structures of graffiti.

His painting practice began in Spain in the mid-1990s, inside the classical grammar of graffiti, fills, connections between letters, the structural tension of wild style forms. What changed his work was not a stylistic decision but a perceptual one: getting close enough to a large painted wall to see what no one else was looking at. The accidental color mixtures, the forms that emerged between letters without being intended, the visual energy that existed only at that scale and that distance. That interior image of the wall became the territory he has been working from ever since.

Over more than 30 years, Hize has distilled that observation into a body of abstract work that operates from the latent architecture of urban writing, not its image, but its underlying structure. Fills with their own chromatic logic. Connections and bridges that generate relational space between forms. The tension of shapes that touch, merge, and release. A piece is finished when the colors connect on their own terms and the forms have become something else, when the origin is still there, but no longer needs to be named.

In parallel, Forner has spent over twenty years as a dancer, choreographer and artistic director in the performing arts — creating and directing shows that have toured internationally. This is not a former career: it is an active practice that runs alongside the studio work, and the two inform each other in ways that go beyond the visible. The body's understanding of rhythm, spatial composition, gesture and time — these are not metaphors in his painting. They are structural tools.