In the present exhibition of Canogar (until Feb 02, 2014 at The Valencian Institute of Modern Art)it has been sought to display, the permanent presence of abstraction throughout his long career, from 1957 to 2013.
Very soon Canogar reached notoriety as an avant-garde painter and in 1957 he is already one of the main representatives of European Abstract Art, when had already founded the Madrid group El Paso with Saura, Millares, Feito and Rivera among others.
Canogar defends Art Informel and the opening of the pro-Franco Spain to the international scene. Informalism was, to Canogar, the expression of freedom, the unrepeatable and unique, embodied with a direct and spontaneous calligraphy, scratching with his hands the matter. As in the words of the own Canogar, the Castilian farmer ploughing the land. Highly intuitive and passionate his works were carried out with the urgency that the time, the age and the theories claimed. Informalism was for him something substantial and mystical, self-affirmation and self-realization. As Canogar knew, this radical position could not be indefinitely maintained without being “academized”. It was not sufficient to communicate and express the tension of the reality of the new social and political awakening in the world.
The third dimension finally gave solution to his new work, to his second period (not represented in this exhibition) that from 1963 onwards would be a complex reality, a new image of man, works for which he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Bienal de São Paulo. The incorporation of new materials allowed him the projection in the reality of the spectator, in an inescapable attempt to make you a participant in a collective drama, “images treated as objects where the human, the object and the quantity, acquire symbolic hierarchy”, as Aguilera Cerní wrote.
In 1975 he returns to abstraction, to an analysis of painting, support structure, the two-dimensionality and, finally, after years of his “fragmentation” period, or structuring of form and matter, of objectification of the painting as a testimony of forces – construction / deconstruction – and marking of territories, as constants of man, Canogar wants to recover the spirit that inspired his first works with a painting that neither idealizes nature nor reproduce it as a mere fragment, but is conceived as a process. A painting where he wants to trace the metaphorical and lyrical intensity of the pictorial surface, reinvent painting in this way “.
More at www.rafaelcanogar.com
