I have always believed that one of the hallmarks of a true artist, the authentic “cotton test,” is their willingness and ability to reinvent themselves and evolve throughout their creative career. This is certainly also the case for … Rafael Canogar (Toledo, 1935), painter, sculptor, engraver, one of the most prestigious artists who has most influenced contemporary Spanish art.
It is practically impossible to summarize his entire creative career, vast and diverse, in these lines. From a very young age, he felt very attracted to art and began his training, already in Madrid, with the painter Daniel Vazquez Diaz.
The decade of the 1950s was a fundamental milestone with its active membership as a member founder of the El Paso group (1957-60), a movement called to radically change the classical canons of post-war Spanish art, by proposing experimental and highly abstract painting, and in which other great Spanish painters like Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares, Luis Feito or the sculptor Martin Chirino. All are members of the informal movement, a very gestural and expressive abstract creative syntax with an important role in its proposals of material and textures.
The best of a career
“Huellas (Paintings 1958-1962)”, an exhibition now organized by the Guillermo de Osma Gallery in Madrid, in collaboration with the Mayor Gallery in London, focuses on these characteristics. The fourteen paintings that compose it, some of which are large, offer a vivid fresco of his interests and his plastic solutions from a moment which coincides with his first years as a leading artist in El Paso and which, in my opinion, represent the best of his entire career.
From top to bottom, “Painting number 7 of the Black Series”; detail of “Table number 21”; and ‘Painting Number 23’ (1958)
They are works full of energy, freedom, expressiveness and creative power, in which the material, composed of a generous richness of oil paint, a great pasty character and practically three-dimensional textures, marks the rhythm and shape of each canvas. The title of the exhibition itself fits perfectly with this almost visceral gesture which opens “furrows” on the surfaces of the supports as if they were plowed earth, and in which the hand becomes a symbolic plowing tool.
It is therefore undoubtedly a splendid opportunity to contemplate and once again enhance this founding stage of his career, especially after the recent anthological exhibition organized at the CentroCentro, also in Madrid.
Rafael Canogar: “Traces (Paintings 1958-1962)”
Guillermo de Osma Gallery. Madrid. C/ Claudio Coello, 4. Until January 23, 2026. Four stars.
After this stage, the Toledon artist will evolve towards figurative positions with a great social charge, to then return to abstraction, which confirms this desire to innovate and explore other possible territories in the plastic creation to which we referred at the beginning. A desire for continuous evolution which always reminds me of the marvelous epigonal drawing of Francis de Goya with the caption “I’m still learning…”.
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