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.

Despite having dedicated his life to painting, from the late-sixties onwards Salvador Victoria worked regularly in printmaking, a field that opened up a host of new possibilities. Throughout his life he worked with many different workshops and printmakers, creating a group of works that evolve in parallel to his painting and readily evince his eagerness to experiment.

Over the course of the seventies, Victoria’s work gradually evolved, slowly leaving behind his previous informalist language as it gave way to constructivist profiles in vibrant flat colours. During this phase he developed a kind of composition he called superposiciones, or ‘overlayerings’: works in which he built up layers of poster board and acetate, which he used to explore volume and light. His experimentation also extended to other materials, such as the ink in the case of this striking work from 1972. Here a large spherical form takes shape by means of circular layers of paint that create the impression of concentric forms. The layering of different colours generates a kind of subtle glaze that allows us to glimpse the paint of the layer beneath, giving the geometric form a sense of volume and movement. The strong eye-catching colouring of the circumference contrasts with the muted black ground, an effect that further enhances the impression of the sphere’s weightlessness. The form’s apparent lightness would seem to foreshadow the artist’s metaphysical paintings from the late-seventies, in which the painter recreated a personal universe of suspended forms.