Artistic Review

As everybody knows, or rather as everybody should know, Totte Mannes is a Finnish artist who has, to a certain extent, assimilated in Spain. She is also an excellent friend, an efficient ambassador in the artistic exchange between her country and Spain and, moreover, a unique and complex artist. All these reasons more than justify writing these lines in the honour of her and her paintings, which, in the end, are the same thing.

Totte has equilibrium which, among other things, has enabled her to retain a Nordic view of life, despite her long sojourn in Spain. Her enigmatic portraits and figurative paintings, her ice-covered landscapes and compositions that resemble vegetation, her poetic dreamscapes, all these images excite our curiosity and desire to penetrate into her universe of symbols, to understand it. This universe contains memories and visions from unknown spheres, whence she is said to have come herself and which she is explaining to us in her paintings: "an artist must be a dreamer, in order to create unreal images, an artist must be unreal, distanced from the world, away, dreaming."

But Totte also has her two feet firmly on the ground, she is resilient and tireless in her work. She knows what she has to do, and she is fulfilling herself and her promising art, and we are all keenly following her progress.

Rafael Canogar