20th-21st Century Spanish

Javier Chapa trained at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts of Valencia. Availing of an abstract language, his painting has a major geometric component on which he superimposes a large amount of freer and more random strokes and sometimes floral stylisations, executed in a subdued palette, something that does not impede an energetic and rigorously composed result.

Chapa belongs to the group of painters at the forefront of Valencia’s art scene in the 1980s, one of the most active in Spain at the time, even though the majority of its members enjoyed rather fleeting celebrity. Those artists shared a certain aesthetic orientation within abstraction, which combined emotion and rationality through usually intense and bright colours and a composition based on long, firm brushstrokes with a highly graphic charge.