To better understand the last stage of Rafael Canogar’s artistic production, it is necessary to know his extensive career, from his training period, under the teaching of the painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz, to the present day. His first stage is strongly marked by his teacher, a figuration with cubist reminiscences, especially in the restraint and rigor of the compositional structure.
Canogar experiments with Informalism from 1954; Unlike American abstraction, European Informalism sought the complete elimination of a formal and conceptual framework. In 1957, Canogar and artists such as Luis Feito, Antonio Saura Atarés, Manolo Millares, Juana Francés, among others, formed El Paso. This group would be extremely influential for the avant-garde movement in Spain.
Canogar experiments with Informalism from 1954; Unlike American abstraction, European Informalism sought the complete elimination of a formal and conceptual framework. In 1957, Canogar and artists such as Luis Feito, Antonio Saura Atarés, Manolo Millares, Juana Francés, among others, formed El Paso. This group would be extremely influential for the avant-garde movement in Spain.
For the painter from Toledo, Informalism had already lost its liberating character and now he perceived it as something that limited him. Seeking to satisfy a need to communicate reality and the events of the time, Canogar takes up figuration without forgetting the findings found in his abstract adventure. At this stage we can observe the fragmentation of the space of successive scenes and the juxtaposition of them in the same frame. The second part of this stage of return to figuration witnesses anonymous figures being beaten, arrested and killed, clear indications of the situation
social and political instability and repression suffered by Spain.