The exhibition which opens at the gallery Fernández-Braso of Madrid on the 6th of march, what are the similarities it has with the recently presented at the IVAM in Valencia?
What are the reasons that you have been exhibited in Madrid this reduced version of that exposure?
The exhibition at the IVAM was a retrospective exhibition, from 1957 until 20013, but unlike many other retrospectives that have been made about me. And it was different for the space. I was given a huge room, beautiful, but where it was not easy to get my realistic work without breaking the harmony of the whole. At the press conference of the exhibition commented on the matter, which, to include all of my evolution would have needed two or three rooms. I made the decision —in the face of the problem of space— to reduce the exposure to only the abstraction. It was a new way of looking at my work, delving into this aspect of my painting. What usually happens is that my work testimonial, to be sculpted and realistic, draws the most attention because it is a work necessarily more literary, and perhaps perish without the necessary space, the consistency sequential. You are 60 years of work, of work done in a country struggling to achieve freedom, to get out of poverty, by modernizing and join back to Europe. Circumstances that are etched in my work: too much road to a single space.
At the exhibition at the IVAM had several works that have never been exhibited in Madrid. My exhibition in Fernández-Braso gave me the chance to expose them, repeating the idea of the IVAM. The title of the exhibition: “The abstractions of Canogar” is, I think, very eloquent. I brought abstractions but respond to different moments of my work and my circumstances. The abstractions of an artist of the generation of the fifties, but that he wanted, without losing its identity, generational, keep a punctuality aesthetics.
Checking your long career, we note that the weight of the figurative in relation to the abstract is significantly lower, at least in appearance. How would you explain this imbalance? And on the other hand, to what extent is linked to your abstract work to the reality that surrounds us?
I've said many times the impact it had on my abstraction informalist that I met on my first trip to Paris, my 17 or 18 years old. My outburst was huge, and was, in his theories, the solution approaches for both plastics as ethical. In my speech of entry at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, defined the informalism as the expression of freedom, of what unique and unique, created with a calligraphy direct and spontaneous. Works eminently intuitive and passionate, made with the urgency that the time, the age and the theories claimed. My abstraction informalist was, for me, something substantial and mystical, self-affirmation and self-realization. I worked very hard with this vital action of expression, and here I brought some works of those moments. But, consequently, with this awareness, he could not accept academizar my pictorial language. We cannot repeat indefinitely with a torn cry of freedom, without academizar your answers, out of time and context.
Like many other artists, both european and american, informalism ceased to be insufficient to communicate and express the tension of reality, of the new social and political conscience to awaken in the world. And this new awareness led me to a new reality, a new iconography as the testimony of a collective struggle. The use of data unless leak-proof abstraction, as a form of communication with the society. And this second period, which was born from the need for expression, lasted its time; your vital time, until 1975, when it ends a period of socio-political and was born the great project of democratic Spain, that brings me back to the abstraction, not the informalism.
Somehow, both expressionism and realism as they were languages of a rebellion deeply felt, in tune with the reality of my surroundings. That reality has changed dramatically with the passage of time and due to the historical circumstances, that once exceeded allowed me to new approaches, without the stress of a moral obligation to leave your testimony.
The exhibition will travel to your different stages abstract from 1957 to the present.
How many stages abstract diferenciarías in your career and how they differ?
I have been an artist that has changed, it has evolved, yes, but less of what one believes or says. Sometimes I'm amazed, when I reproduced a painting done as a student of painting, my 16 or 17 years old, who mention him as my first time. Well, no, it's a box of my training as an artist, and nothing more than that.
After 1975, with my back to the abstraction, my painting is going to change, but not so much as to call them stages or periods. Yes it is true that, within the abstraction, or between moments of total abstraction, it appears a period where the representation of man appears schematically as a recovery of memory, the historical avant-garde. The representation of man as a plastic sign, as a structure or hanger on which to hang the painting. Let me play a few lines of Calvo Serraller, taking his text for the catalogue of the IVAM, and that is on that line: “When looking back on the work that now makes Rafael Canogar, after leaving behind a career that expands more than half a century...not only feel admiration for how much, and well done in this work without fainting, but a true vertigo by finding in what is now painted, as in a compendium revealing, traces of what has been done almost since it began to do so”.
Your successive stages abstract we have explored almost all of the plastic possibilities offered by the painting. From the gesture to the geometry, of works that are saturated with raw and textures to other more essential and minimalist. What aspects have led to your step from one style to another?, how the purely plastics, personal, or both?
I think that, fundamentally, in my painting have always been present opposing forces, the struggle of opposites. Also a formal structure, equilibrium, where the matter, or if you like, the mark of the artist on the subject, it is fundamental. What has never been is geometric. If ever there are certain forms of composition more formal, never geometrical, have been as an expression of containment of expressive, of matter, of the gesture.
Your first exhibition was in Madrid, in 1954, thus going to serve 60 years of that date. From this perspective, one notices a progressive distancing from what it was at first qualified (and any form of praise) as “traits proper Spanish”. This is true tenebrismo, trend, sign, simplicity, reduced palette to white and black. If we add to this the issues related to the national policy of those years, the link with what proper English was evident, but to what extent was premeditated and that progress towards a language that is more european, more international? On the other hand, what are the particularities of the Spanish culture you can find in your current work?, if it is, there are.
Can we not talk about premeditated, just what has happened. The artist is not only an artist, also is a citizen, an individual who lives in society, and their circumstances. “... Are the cultural needs of its society for which the artist expresses himself,” said the american poet Frank O'hara. The current society has little to do with the age 50 years, or 70, we have other concerns and other frameworks. And my current work wants to be a response to the new premises and concerns. I want to rescue the space of the painting, to recover your dimension poetic and metaphorical, your ability to ilusionarnos, of love, of vibrate again with the space of the painting, a good painting, and of their ability of communication, nothing else!, and nothing less!
I seek to recapture the spirit that inspired my first book, a painting that neither idealizes the nature or the play as a mere fragment, but rather is conceived as a process. Morphogenesis, nature as a whole, sublime. A painting naked, without concessions or winks, a painting a radical and essential where a trace of the intensity metaphorical of the pictorial surface, “reinventing the painting,” as I have defined them in other times, and that is my response to the labyrinth creative today, by an artist of the generation of the fifties.