Gallery Álvaro Alcázar presents, on occasion of this new edition of Arte Madrid Apertura Origin, an exhibition with the latest works by Rafael Canogar. It is a representative sample of the works painted during lockdown and months afterwards. The paintings have been made on a material hitherto unprecedented in Canogar’s career; methacrylate.
The use of this material conditions the aesthetics of the works exhibited here, which are mostly vertical paintings with one or two color fields applied on the reverse and crossed on the obverse by thick material strokes. The methacrylate transparency allows painting on both sides and, according to the painter, it allows becoming active the empty space between the two surfaces. Canogar also infuses them with a strong symbolic charge, since for him, they represent landscapes of heaven-earth and earth-air, where man’s imprint is evident through the brushstrokes.
Rafael Canogar, who began his career in the late 1950s as a founding member of the Grupo El Paso, takes up again the search for essentiality that moved the abstract expressionism and informalism at that moment. The artist has recently highlighted his willingness to return to working with minimal elements in order to enhance his radicalism, as he did in times of the Spanish avant-garde. Thus, he returns to his Origin, closing the circle that began to trace back in the 50s.
Finally, through this exhibition the painter continues his assertion to recover the role of painting as an essential genre, thanks to its capacity to communicate emotions, exciting us or making us vibrate. For the artist, painting has lost relevance in favor of other genres due to the conception of art as a merely consumer good.
*Thanks to the collaboration of Arte Global, Red Collectors and Idealista.
