Miguel Ángel Campano

MIGUEL ÁNGEL CAMPANO (Madrid, 1948–2018).
“Untitled,” 1993.
Oil and collage on paper.
It bears a label on the reverse from the Juana de Aizpuru Gallery.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 38.5 x 52 cm; 60 x 73 cm (frame).
At first glance, this work appears as a field of forces in constant transformation. Miguel Ángel Campano unfolds a complex network of thick, sinuous black lines that traverse the surface with an almost organic energy. Far from being the result of an improvised gesture, these strokes intertwine with bands of earthy color and fragments of newspaper attached via collage, forming a composition in which density and emptiness, movement and stillness, are held in perfect balance. The viewer’s gaze travels across the work without finding a definitive resting point, caught up in a visual web that seems to expand beyond the limits of the paper.
Unlike other artists of his generation, Campano never remained faithful to a single artistic language. Each stage of his career involved a critical reevaluation of his own approaches, viewing painting as a space for exploration where tradition and modernity could engage in dialogue without hierarchy. In this sense, the 1990s were deeply marked by his intense admiration for Nicolas Poussin, whose influence transformed his understanding of composition. What Campano found in the French painter was not an iconographic model, but a lesson in pictorial architecture. He admired Poussin’s extraordinary ability to construct space through rhythms, tensions, and internal balances—an almost musical organization that lent solidity to the image. This lesson is essential to understanding a work like this one; although the surface appears dominated by the freedom of the gesture, beneath that appearance lies a carefully conceived structure, where each line finds its meaning in relation to the whole.
Miguel Ángel Campano was one of the key figures in the renewal of Spanish painting in the 1980s. His career was recognized with the National Prize for the Visual Arts in 1996 and with major exhibitions, including the retrospective dedicated to his work from the 1990s at the Palacio de Velázquez in the Reina Sofía Museum in 1999. His work is part of the collections of leading institutions such as the Reina Sofía Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the British Museum in London.