Ràfols-Casamada, a painter, draughtsman and art teacher, decided to abandon his architectural studies to devote himself to painting. In the 1950s, with the aid of a scholarship, he went to Paris, where he made a close study of the great avant-garde artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Starting from a post-Cubist figurative style, he moved towards informalismo and Neo-Dada, and then in the eighties he adopted a form of abstraction derived from American , especially that of Mark Rothko (1903-1970). It is very difficult to sum up his work, since it reflects an idea of art as an expressive need, and this makes him one of the pioneering painters and leading figures of

 Lyrical Abstraction 

A tendency that emerged within abstract painting in 1945 in France, as a reaction against the excessive coldness of

 Geometric Abstraction 

A term introduced in the 1920s to name a kind of abstract art based on scientific and mathematical principles. The main goal was to eliminate all subjectivity in favour of art based on the essence of geometric forms. Its main champions were Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).

and attempting to give more room to the expression of the artist’s emotions. The movement favoured colour over form through techniques like watercolour and oil paint, which would be the most widely used by its practitioners. Major sources of inspiration were the painting of Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and automatism in Surrealist painting. Key names within the movement are Pierre Soulages (1919), Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) and Hans Hartung (1904-1989).

in Spain.
 
Ràfols-Casamada’stalent as an engraving artist is patent in his ability to assimilate various different languages, for instance Joan Miró’s free use of colour, Sempere’s kinetic compositions and the dichotomy between black and white in Eduardo Chillida’s graphic work.
 
His prints capture a sense of simplicity, experimentation and chromatic sensibility, as can be seen in the work at hand with its predominant blue, and in a search for harmony between fiction and reality.