Rafael Canogar [I]Realidades [Obras 1949-2024]. CentroCentro, 2025

Madrid,

Some more than twenty years after the last anthology of Rafael Canogar in Madrid, and coinciding with the 90th anniversary of the artist and with the start of a new stage in Centrocenter, which will pay special attention to their own exhibitions to active authors who work in The city, we can already visit on the fifth floor of the Cibeles Palace “(i) realities. Works 1949-2024 ”, Review of the milestones of the trajectory of what was one of the founders of the El Paso group. It is his commissioner Alfonso de la Torre, who stressed in the presentation of the sample the intensity of the dedication of canoeing to the act of painting, understood as communicative exercise and as a link in the search for the unaspedable.

They make up the journey about sixty works – mostly paintings, but also collages, sculptural reliefs and an exempt sculpture – and some of them come from the personal collection of the artist, so that they had rarely been able to see until now. This retrospective is structured in five sections, not strictly chronological, which account for the transit of canoeing from an early figuration to abstraction and its continuous closeness to the artistic debates of their time, or their times, which are already several since 1949.

Born in Toledo in 1935, he moved to Madrid being a child and not far from centrocenter resides and continues to work; Nor did the study of Vázquez Díaz be much from there where, in his own expression, he could imbute himself from Fire of the modern Before his transfer to Paris in the fifties and his contact with Miró and Klee, two of his referents in the field of abstraction. Just the first section, Nature, that you have moved mebegins with the presentation of a view of the garden of the Huelva painter dated in 1949, in María de Molina. From the teachings of that, I tempted Canagar modes of structuring, to vertebrate the pictorial tensions, and in this composition he explored his options when making the image of La Mancha emerge. That was one of the first of a long succession of landscapes, the following raised from the extent of color, in forceful pictorial planes that derive from an analysis and concentration process. These shades, in the background, come to claim the refined and infinite of space (the field in Castilla, its vast soils and skies, were often its source; also the stations, the umbría, army places where to find placidity).

Rafael Canogar (i) realities (works 1949-2024). Centrocentro, 2025

A very significant period in Canagar’s career, and in general in Spanish contemporary art, it was the year 1957 and its surroundings: between 1957 and 1960 it would be a member of the aforementioned group El Paso, which opened in our country the channels of the avant -garde from expressiveness, chromatic austerity and commitment. One of his stamps was a peculiar light treatment, which he has referred as “a light like steel” that acquires primacy over the form that facilitates the emergence of the images, the brio of the white, the grays or the gray or the brown between blackness. His approach at that time to informalism did not have so much to do with his defense of a Another art of mural inspiration but with an attitude of observation of the world, allegedly, in all its possible dimensions, also those that could approach the surreal dreamlike: I would like to have your feet on earth, be in contact with reality, create organic forms, live, because art can no longer (today ever) dehumanize (…). Finding (That reality) In its subjective and intimate truthhe wrote in 1959.

That same year he also left: We have forgotten the physical beauty of classic canons because she has nothing to do with our reality. Sometimes we need monsters because what in life is ugly, in painting can be beautiful, living and expressive (…). I believe that the separation between abstraction and figuration must overcome it and focus reality from another different angle, finding it in its subjective and intimate truthan intimacy that can manifest in textures and monochromies.

Rafael Canogar (i) realities (works 1949-2024). Centrocentro, 2025

A third episode of the sample is located in the eighties, when the painter used without facing them from the procedures of representation and stripping (abstractions and constructions) and, in any case, he tried in the viewer the intensification of the gaze. He summoned both the visible and the mystery, to the stain and the geometry, and took care of the extension of the color bands or their hatching, the achievement of a harmony between the linear and the fluid. One of his continuous impulses was to look for new paths even if they implied the end of the recognizable images.

Apart from the disquisitions about the representation or absence of it, the search for non -palpable and it is likely to take the canvas, there were stages in which Canogar especially reflected on the human condition and the effects on it of pain and time. In the mid -sixties he returned from the informalism to which he called “realism” leading to his compositions, sometimes by relief and body fragment or fabrics, to individuals fallen or injured, accentuatedly alone or mired in the mass, mournings. The press of the time (or almost all times) could give rise to these visions and ask about what Jean Genet called Secret Pain Royalty. It stands out for its drama, stressed in the assembly, The prisoner (1967), an attempt to participate to the spectator of a collective misadventure. On pieces like this, in polyester, fiberglass and oil on table, said Aguilera Cerni that is not necessary, before these works, pronounce speeches against violence; The violent, inhuman and dehumanized, is inseparable from the materiality of the object.

From Queen Sofia has reached Centrocenter Urban scene (1970), another realistic construction that, while channeling aesthetic searches, transmits a citizen consciousness: bodies and shadows are intertwined and melt.

The end point to this exhibition is put by paintings, from the mid -fifties, which refer to Klee’s worlds and looked, both relevant to both the American abstract expressionists and for European informalists. In the Swiss, Canogar the magic and mystery, although, in front of that, he needed to set limits, delimit his developments; In the Spanish surrealist, an aesthetic pillar. And in both, support to enter the expressionist abstraction.

The commissioner recalled in the presentation of this retrospect that, according to Roberto Calasso, the contemporary world must be observed from what he does not have: from his relationship with the mystery, the invisible and the divine. For De la Torre, Canagar production points precisely at that void.

Rafael Canogar (i) realities (works 1949-2024). Centrocentro, 2025
Rafael Canogar (i) realities (works 1949-2024). Centrocentro, 2025

“Rafael Canogar (i) realities (works 1949-2024)”

Centrocentro. CIBELES PALACE

CIBELES SQUARE, 1

Madrid

From January 30 to May 18, 2025

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