Rafael Canogar

Rafael Canogar: 'Imprints (Paintings 1958 -1962)' is an exhibition comprising fourteen landmark paintings from the early, ‘Informalist’ period (1958-62) when Canogar first made his name.

‘Our art started as an answer to the needs of that time,’ Canogar has said of these years, ‘with the will to transform the art world and make it dynamic, with [pictures] that were at the same time a protest - violent, daring and mystical.’1 Inspired initially by the primordial, semi-abstract realities of Paul Klee’s work and then also by the more impulsive, contemporary example of 1950s American Action painting, Canogar’s first ‘Informalist’ pictures were dramatic explorations of the expressive possibilities of matter and gesture. As in such pictures as, Jaque, Pintura, and Untitled of 1959, for example, his work took the form of an often vigorous and aggressive type of abstraction in which the presentation of matter, freed from its use as a medium for representation, was transformed into an evocative subject all of its own.

Here, the thick, earthy, matter of oil paint has been expressively worked into violent and explosive new forms by the artist, using his fingers to trace furrows of feeling and channels of impulsive physical action into and across their surfaces. Often both visceral and traumatic, the stark polarities of these predominantly black and white pictures seem imbued, like so much Spanish art, with a fusion of the twisted pain and suffering of martyrdom and the balletic violence and grace of the corrida.