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.

In 1967 Salvador Victoria began to delve into the world of printmaking which would become, from that moment onwards and until the end of his life, a core part of his artistic production. 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. In the seventies 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. He then transferred this same concept of layering to printmaking, printing different inks one on top of another, a technique with which he achieved interesting plastic and optical effects.

The year of 1972 would prove highly productive for the artist in printmaking. The holdings of the BBVA Collection include several silkscreen prints dating from this year, which provide an interesting overview of the wealth of his printmaking. In them one can note some of the elements that recurred throughout his practice and shaped his personal plastic and conceptual universe. These include the circle and the pyramid, the figures in this piece produced by the artist and printed at the Ángel López workshop. In it, the forms seem to float in space, foreshadowing the metaphysical worlds of his later works from the mid-seventies.