‘[I]Realities’, by Rafael Canogar in Centrocenter: a master of pictorial freedom

Being a young artist, he will participate in the Foundation of El Paso, which was presented publicly in 1957 through a declaration of principles and a newsletter, being its founders Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares, Manuel Rivera, Pablo Serrano, Rafael Canagar, Luis Feito,Juana Francés and Antonio Suárez, with the collaboration of critics Manuel Conde and José Ayllón. Canagar developed at that time a painting of a purely expressionist nature, giving free fridge to a truthful drama, leaving the traces of his hands in the matter, trying to sediment his mood in the work.

In the crucial number that the magazine ‘Son Armadans’ papers He dedicated to El Paso in 1959, Rafael Canogar publishes a text, entitled ‘Having his feet on the ground’, in which he warns that he has to make an enormous effort to perform his works, sometimes even hating them: «When I have front To me the purity of a white fabric, a mutual dialogue is established. The painting, apparently white, is created, gradually forming in myself. There comes a time when I cannot resist the temptation to overcome its serenity ».

I feel dissatisfied

And it continued: «Sometimes it happens that after minutes, hours, this communication is not established, or that the global vision of its structure escapes me. This causes in me an irritation and rage difficult to explain and I feel dissatisfied ». The painting ends up being dominated by the black color, sometimes the red appearing, dyeing the space of anguish.

Sánchez Camargo has already recognized, in the mid -fifties, a intense “asceticism” in Canagar painting. For his part, the same artist stressed years after his work is very important the subconscious not so much to surrender to sublimation or escapism but, on the contrary, maintaining, at all times, contact with reality.

It should be remembered that Rafael Canogar closes his informalist period in the early sixties, considering that gesturalism could lose its authenticity. From that moment on it will paint figures that transmit human drama without opting for ‘the daily life’ of pop art. He will brilliantly develop a poetic of the commitment or, better, an objectivist process since 1963 in which, as the artist himself declared, he intended to “express the chaotic of reality.”

In 1958 Canagar said that it was not about seeking the ordination of the chaotic moment, “but a union with reality itself in an essential contradiction between the explainable and the inexplicable.” Gestualism is replaced by a conception of art as a kind of mirror of dehumanization, ceasing to be the obsessive tension in the-abstract to transfer to the characters that are dramas-object, beings trapped in a cossed world.

Rafael Canogar, as reveals the magnificent exhibition that has curated Alfonso de la Torre in Centrocenter, He has always sought throughout his varied stages and styles of an “eclectic commitment”, the expressiveness that would be beating in artistic matter. This artist found different hangers where to hang the painting, of the abstract gesture to the requisified bodies, the fractured surfaces or the head schemes that alluded to the sculptures of Julio González to the most recent ‘sweeps’ of pictorial material on metacrylate.

He has shown that artistic experience requires going beyond certainties, avoiding the bureaucratization of imagination; You have to live on the edge of the danger to follow the images to the background, in the direction of its extreme dimension, Without fear of loss.

Rafael Canogar

‘[I]realities (works 1949-2024) ‘. Centrocentro. Madrid. CIBELES SQUARE, 1. Commissioner: Alfonso de la Torre. Until May 18. Four stars.

Canagar, with extraordinary honesty, has not wanted to repeat itself, modulating its creation of different ways to face the corresponding reality. Its fragmented poetics is an example, Truly extraordinary, creative freedom.