La experiencia del arte (edición especial), 2019

Rafael Canogar  

This small original lithograph by Rafael Canogar, made in 2019 and issued in an edition of 50 copies, is linked by its title to the special edition of La experiencia del arte. On a square field of warm golden ochre, Canogar lays down broad vertical drags of black ink that descend from the top edge, now dense and opaque, now broken into streaks, drips and dry-brush filaments that let the ground show through. The image has the speed and physicality of a single gesture of the brush or spatula, and the contrast between the gleaming ochre and the black recalls the austere palette of Spanish Informalism, in which black was a colour charged with drama and history. In its reduced format, the print condenses the essential qualities of the artist's late abstraction: rhythm, matter, the trace of the hand and the tension between control and accident. Rafael Canogar (Toledo, 1935) was a co-founder in 1957 of the El Paso group, which renewed Spanish painting with an Informalist abstraction of international scope; after a period of critical realism in the 1960s and 1970s, he returned to an abstraction of great structural rigour. The impression is numbered at lower left and hand-signed in pencil at lower right.