Man developed on the Costa da Morte a peculiar way of life that caused suspicion at first, but ended up penetrating the inhabitants of the place. Hermit and artist, sullen and misunderstood, but also visionary in many ways, he became famous for his peculiar dress, barely covered by loincloth, and for the place he chose to rebuild his life: a space by the sea, without electricity or running water, but in full contact with nature, rocked by the waves and in which he could unleash his artistic inspiración.

His communion with the nature and the way of life he chose were not always well understood, but the coherence with which he developed his life were imposed on prejudices. Man dedicated himself to modeling the landscape, shaping the stones and objects that the sea was dragging, but also the cement of the dike built in the immediate vicinity of the museum garden that was built over the years.

During the 40 years he spent at Camelle, Man was also creating a huge amount of artistic material in the form of drawings, texts and photographs. And he wanted those who visited him also contribute with his own illustrations to the notebooks he was completing.

With the slick of the Prestige, his image, marked by pain, became an icon of the catastrophe and also helped to enliven the wave of solidarity that attracted thousands of volunteers to fight against the oil in the Galician coast. But the blow suffered by the place he had turned into his home and the nature he loved so much was too much for Man. On December 28, 2002 he died because of the sadness he had plunged into.

His legacy is debated today between survival and the return to nature. The Man de Camelle Museum opened in a municipal building has become a depository of an important part of his artistic production and hosts an exhibition that deepens Man’s relationship with the place in which he lived. There you can find photographs, sketches, documents with aphorisms, personal objects, notebooks, drawings made by the people who visited him and some of the pieces he created with the objects that the sea returned to the land. And what was his home, the Casa del Alemán, next to the sea, you can still see how the precarious house he occupied for decades was, although the passage of time and the action of the tides and the storms has already damaged in his garden museum while the debate continues between those who defend that those creations should also be protected and those who consider that Man would have preferred that it was nature itself that made that decision. There is no doubt that his message of connection with our natural environment remains more alive than ever.

This is the case of “A Santa”, a polychrome wood sculpture with which Asorey participated in 1926 in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid and was the object at that time of strong discussions for its original nature. The creator was inspired by the women of the Galician rural world to break the aesthetic canons and get away from the feminine ideal of the time, something that earned him much applause, but also criticism. The realism of the nude represented by Asorey, with the marks of hard agricultural work very present and elements such as the yoke that also invited a deeper reflection on the meaning of the work, were some of the reasons for a controversy that was spread by the press of the time. The division of opinions faced those who emphasized their realism and daring and described Asorey as an artist of exceptional faculties, with whom disqualified the aesthetic sense of the work.

Although it was not “A Santa” but a sculpture of San Francisco that allowed Asorey to get the first medal of that exhibition, the controversial piece aroused interest on the other side of the Atlantic. It was acquired by the House of Galicia of Montevideo and embarked from Vigo to America in 1951, continent in which it has remained until the present time. Now, almost 70 years after its departure, the transgressive sculpture is going to come back to Galicia and will do so thanks to an agreement reached by the Consellería de Cultura e Turismo and the House of Galicia of the Uruguayan capital.

“A Santa” will be one of the main pieces of “Galicia, a story of the world”, the first great exhibitions programmed by the Xunta on the occasion of Xacobeo 2021. This exhibition, curated by the journalist and disseminator Manuel Gago and who also has the advice of the historian Pilar Cagiao Vila and the collaboration of the Consello da Cultura Galega and the Secretaría Xeral de Emigración, will allow to contemplate in the Gaiás Center Museum more than 300 creations of great symbolic importance for Galicia. It will be inaugurated on November 14th and can be visited until April 12th, 2020.