The Álvaro Alcázar gallery presents, in this new edition of Arte Madrid Apertura Origen, an exhibition of Rafael Canogar's latest works. It is a representative sample of the works painted during the confinement and the following months, made on a support so far unpublished in Canogar's career; methacrylate.

It is the use of this support that conditions the aesthetics of the works presented here, which are mostly vertical paintings with one or two fields of color applied on the back and crossed on the front by intense, more material strokes. Methacrylate, thanks to its transparency, allows painting on both sides, making, according to the painter, the empty space between the two surfaces active. Canogar also infuses them with a strong symbolic charge, because for him, they represent landscapes of sky-earth and earth-air, where the imprint of man is evident through the brushstrokes.

Rafael Canogar, who began his career in the late 1950s as a founding member of Grupo el Paso, returns here to the search for essentiality that moved abstract expressionism and informalism at the time. He himself has recently emphasized his willingness to return to work with minimal elements to enhance its radicalism, as he did in times of full Spanish avant-garde. He thus returns to his origin, closing the circle that he began to trace back in the 50s.

Finally, through this exhibition the painter continues his claim to recover the space of painting as an essential genre, thanks to its ability to communicate emotions, to excite us or make us vibrate, and that today, according to the artist, would have lost its importance to other genres, benefited by the conception of art as a mere consumer product.