R-5 belongs to a transitional period in Salvador Victoria’s career, which coincided with the time he spent in Paris (1956-1964), which would prove highly significant both in his personal and professional life.

After graduating from the San Carlos School of Fine Arts of Valencia, then steeped in tradition and profoundly influenced by Neo-Impressionism, like many fellow artists of his generation, Victoria left for Paris in search of the freedom and opportunities not to be found in post-war Spain. In Paris he was a regular visitor to the city’s galleries and museums and became part of an intellectual and creative circle in which he made friends with artists like Pierre Soulages (1919), Lucio Muñoz (1929-1998) and Eusebio Sempere (1923-1985).

During his period in Paris he purged his practice of any trace of figuration as he moved closer to , the prevailing avant-garde movement of the time. Years later, in 1988, he would read his PhD thesis on Spanish lnformalismo Outside Spain: a Personal Vision and Experience 1955-1965. In it he gave an account of the relationships he forged with a significant number of exiled artists, many of whom were virtually unknown in their countries of origin.

Even though for many of those young artists was a sign of rebellion against the situation in Spain, in the case of Victoria it was more deeply rooted in constraint and reflection, dominated by an almost calligraphic brushwork in which the combination of dark and light colours already foreshadowed a certain spatiality.

Those informalist works are far removed from the artist’s signature mid-career compositions based on geometric forms. However, from 1960s onwards one could begin to note a sense of order, coupling the expressiveness of the gesture with a thoroughly meditated distribution of areas of colour across the work as a whole.

Victoria’s output in this lesser known period of transition is highly interesting, for it faithfully reflects the teachings he picked up in Paris, with elements that would be key in his period of maturity as an artist, like the influence of Primitivism and , or the study of light and space.