In this new edition of Arte Madrid Apertura Origen, the Álvaro Alcázar gallery presents an exhibition of Rafael Canogar's latest works. It is a representative sample of the works painted during confinement and the following months, made on a medium hitherto unseen in Canogar's career: methacrylate.

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

Rafael Canogar, who began his career in the late 1950s as a founding member of Grupo el Paso, here returns to the search for the essentiality that then moved abstract expressionism and informalism. He himself has recently highlighted his desire to return to working with minimal elements to enhance his radicalism, as he did during the Spanish avant-garde era. He thus returns to his origins, closing the circle that he began to trace back in the 1950s.

Finally, through this exhibition the painter continues his claim to recover the space of painting as an essential genre, thanks to its capacity to communicate emotions, excite us or make us vibrate, and which today, according to the artist, has lost its importance to other genres, benefiting from the conception of art as a mere consumer product.