Rafael Canogar

RAFAEL CANOGAR (Toledo, 1935).
"Guanche head", 1985.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and titled on the back.
Provenance: Private collection of the painter Juan José Gil (Gran Canaria, 1947-2023).
Measurements: 55 x 46 cm.
The work Cabeza guanche (1985) is inscribed in a particularly significant stage in the career of Rafael Canogar, one of the founding members of the group El Paso and key figure of the aesthetic renovation of the Spanish art of the postwar period. Made in the eighties, this piece reflects the expressive maturity of the artist, who in those years moved away from the more narrative languages of his figurative period to return to a gestural synthesis that combines matter, sign and cultural memory.
The composition is structured around an almost archetypal form: a thick, energetic and curved line that delimits a frontal silhouette similar to a head. The gesture, executed with black brushstrokes of strong corporeality on a light background, reveals the persistence of the material automatism that characterized Canogar's first searches. However, in this work the energy of the stroke does not only refer to formal experimentation, but activates a symbolic field that dialogues with the Guanche culture, the indigenous roots of the Canary Islands archipelago.
The reference to the Guanche should not be understood as a literal quotation, but as the evocation of a prehistoric and telluric imaginary: schematic faces, clay idols, rock marks and ancestral geometries that, in their elementariness, seem to be summoned by the forcefulness of the pictorial gesture. Canogar transforms these cultural echoes into a contemporary sign, stripped of detail but charged with archaeological resonance. In this way, Cabeza guanche articulates a bridge between Spanish pictorial modernity, heir to material abstraction and informalism, and the memory of Atlantic cultures.
A disciple of Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Canogar was a co-founder of the group "El Paso", and during the fifties he developed a fully informalist work, which drifted during the sixties into an increasingly complex narrative figuration. During his mature stage, from 1975 onwards, Canogar invents a new iconography, his own and personal, which he expresses through the mask, the head, the face, as a representation of the man who loses his individuality and becomes a plastic sign, as can be seen in the work we now present. His awards include the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1982), he is a member of the San Fernando Academy, and is represented in the most important modern art collections around the world, such as the Reina Sofia Museum, the MOMA in New York, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg, the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico, and the Chicago Art Institute, among many others. The Olympic Suite is composed of 50 lithographs and serigraphs chosen to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centennial of modern Olympism.