Salvador Victoria is a key figure in the renewal of the visual arts in Spain in the twentieth century. His painting evolved from an informalist language in the fifties—coinciding with his time in Paris and his discovery of and —towards in pure colours and forms, with the circle as the main motif in his compositions. These features would visually and conceptually mark his work in the seventies. After a period of tireless experimentation, in the eighties he recovered the free-flowing, vibrant brushwork of his early practice. Without ever abandoning the circle, his compositions from this period are sustained on a more leisurely rhythm than the works from his period in Paris and would be a point of inflection in his long process of research into the form, colour and matter, the elements which Victoria used to transcend the boundaries of the purely visual.

From 1967 onwards Victoria combines his painting practice with an equally interesting production of prints. Throughout his lifetime he collaborated with various workshops and printmakers who helped him to materialize his manifold experiments in this field. Following an early phase of experimentation with multiple colours, from the mid-seventies his palette becomes more neutral, tending towards a spectrum of earthy colours, associated more closely with the tellurian world. Homenaje a Antonio Machado is a good example of this evolution towards a more subdued palette. The different tones of yellow in the sphere in the upper part of the composition recall the chromatic distribution used by Josef Albers in his iconic Homage to the Square. Formally speaking, this silkscreen by Victoria continues to focus on his staple iconography: crowning the composition is a sphere while, as if rising from the horizon before the spectator’s eyes, a number of overlapping rings, achieved by means of building up different layers of paint, instil it with a sense of movement.

In his paintings and prints from the seventies Victoria invites spectators to explore metaphysical worlds created through a balanced combination of geometric forms and colour.