José Viola Gamón (Zaragoza, May 18, 1916 - San Lorenzo de El Escorial, March 8, 1987), known by the pseudonym Manuel Viola (name he adopted after the end of the Spanish Civil War), was a Spanish poet and painter. abstract style belonging to the group El Paso, whose career was developed mainly in Aragon.
Viola had a self-taught education, despite the fact that she began university studies in Philosophy and Letters in Barcelona, which were cut short with the start of the civil war.
Along with firms such as Lorca, J. V. Foix, Alberti or Cocteau, Viola published poems with a clear surrealist ascendancy: "the red wine of the air curls / in a naked skeleton of a horse
In 1936 he was part of the ADLAN (Friends of the New Arts) group in Barcelona and in May of the same year he wrote the manifesto for the Lógicofobista Exhibition together with the art critic Magí Albert Cassanyes.
With an anarchist spirit, in the civil war he joined the militia ranks of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) in defense of the Republic.
The year 1958 marks the beginning of his personal style, at the same time that he joined the avant-garde pictorial group El Paso made up of, among others, the painter Antonio Saura and the sculptor Pablo Serrano, both from Aragon.
However, since joining the El Paso group in the late 1950s, his painting has operated from energetic visual forms generated from a central mass.
In the first years of his change of style in 1958, his painting dispensed with colour, and basically worked from black and white, with a wide intermediate range of grays and some highly effective earth.
In 1972 he returned to Lleida where he presented his first exhibition at the Gosè Hall of the city's College of Architects after years of absence and later at the Lonja de Zaragoza.
He died after suffering from lung cancer for a long time on March 8, 1987 in El Escorial, where he had lived since 1961. He was buried in the cemetery of this town.
His work can be found, among others, in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Abstract Art Museum in Cuenca, the Elche Museum of Contemporary Art, the Guggenheim in New York, the Liège Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of Buenos Aires.