Rafael Armengol

RAFAEL ARMENGOL (Benimodo, Valencia, 1940).
Untitled, 1977.
Mixed media on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 43 x 64 cm, 65 x 87 cm (frame).
Armengol, throughout his long career, has found his own language, a style that includes all the resources, investigating around how the different mechanical systems reproduce the image in the media; contrasting these contextual elements with images of the classic iconography. Through the work of color, Rafael Armengol has given an outlet to its basic axes: the concern to make a work linked to his time and, from his admiration for the classics, to show the ability to maintain a permanent dialectic with successive re-readings from the current perspective.
Recently awarded the Alfons Roig Prize for Plastic Arts, Rafael Armengol develops a work based on very diverse references, such as the photographs he himself takes. Trained at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia, he held his first exhibitions in 1962, together with Manuel Boix and Arturo Heras. Under the title "Monotheistic Triad", these artists represented in Spain the first version of the "Nouvelle Réalité". After this first stage of marked neo-realist sense, from 1970 there is an evolution in his art that leads him to develop a series of subversive paintings, with disturbing elements, composing a language in which there is something tragic and provocative under his meticulous and analytical narratives. He has held numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in several group exhibitions in Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona, etc. He is currently represented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid.