Rafael Canogar

Toledo, 1935

After leaving school to devote himself fully to artistic training, he studied with Daniel Vázquez Díaz in the mornings and at the Circle of Fine Arts in the afternoons.

In 1955, he produces his first abstract works, with a clear influence of Miró, but also of Braque and Picasso. In them, he emphasizes the prominence of gesture, matter and color, adding pictorial paste to the canvas to highlight the monochromatic backgrounds. At the end of the fifties, together with other artists, he founded the group “El Paso”, where he developed an informalism that denotes a clear freedom of creation, freeing his own impulses. Thanks to his activity with El Paso and his exhibition at the Venice Biennale, he manages to create a link with the L’Attico gallery in Rome, which will accompany him throughout his artistic career. Towards the sixties and with a tone of social criticism, he began the series Personajes, and between the sixties and seventies, he immersed himself in figuration to continue developing the same themes, but with greater three-dimensionality and a darker palette of colors. Subsequently, he abandoned figuration and returned to the abstraction that had characterized the beginnings of his career.

The Suñol Soler collection contains three works from the artist’s darkest period, where he shows a clear commitment to social denunciation.