Manuel Cia

Noted artist Manuel Cia has lived and painted just southeast of Old Town Plaza in Albuquerque since 1979. His work is the synthesis of ancient and modernist art movements. His layered images are a compilation of styles, mediums, cultures, historical, and artistic conventions, philosophies and psychological archetypes. Highly sophisticated and filled with subleties, his vibrant works are brimming with visual meaning and literary content. He easily combines realism, impressionism and abstraction into powerful and aesthetically pleasing images.

Cia studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and the Art Institute of San Francisco. The rich subject matter that lured the Eastern artists to come and paint in the Southwest also brought Cia back to his native New Mexico. Studying the colorful myths and legends, he realized that the philosophy of an archetypal shaman had been leading him as an artist all his life.

"For me the Shaman is the most powerful archetypal figure. He was not only a medicine man, but the first primordial artist."

This realization evolved over the years into a style that made a spirit world of myths and dreams visible to us through the artist's imagination, a passing reality in a space/time metaphysically inspired expression. Cia's innovations include the combining of the realist and primitive styles, such as a realist child with a stylized mother, or a realist figure with a background of primitive faces representing the spirit world. In the fleeting reality of myths and dreams all things become metaphoric expressions, such as a figure changing into birds, or a modern man changing into a shaman.

This is Cia: deep passion driven by archetypal figures.

Manuel Cia's art is original in concept - beyond excellence - a new "ism" in art. From it's aesthetic significance his art can only be judged as important. His art has been shown nationally and internationally as a member of S.A.I., Society of American Impressionists, and I.A.C.A., the International Association for Contemporary Art. He has been written about by John Meigs, Regina Tatum Cooke, Mary Carroll Nelson, and the New Yorker Dorothy Roatz Myers. His art theory has been scholarly recognized and he is in national Who's Who's, including the Who's Who of the International Biographical Centre Cambridge, England, and the Marquis Who's Who in the world.

His is not the quixotic search for an impossible dream, but the gentle and determined pursuit of a new reality. - Nancy C. Benson, Southwest Art

An acknowledged living master. - Art Talk

Here is great skill and sensitive touch combined with imagination and brave style. Look closely, Cia is that rarest of beings, an inspired artist. - John Meigs, Southwestern Old Times

Cia is among the "masters of light"...the creme de la creme of American Impressionists. - Art Talk

Cia's tasteful and inspired blend of art forms lends an ethereal magic to his work, casting a mesmerizing spell. - Arla S. Ertz, Artists of the Rockies and the Golden West