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.

Within Victoria’s overall production his graphic output is as important as his painting. The artist first discovered the medium during his time in Paris, thanks to the workshops of Wilfredo Arcay and Galerie Denise René, which was instrumental in producing prints by contemporary artists. In 1967 Victoria started to experiment in this field, first with silkscreen printing, which he employed to achieve a flat finish; he then started to explore other methods such as lithography (with the artist Dimitri Papagueorguiu, 1928) and chalcography, which allowed him to add a new dimension to his works. The circle first made an appearance in his work in 1965, believing it to be the most complete and perfect form, and from then onwards it became the essential element in his compositions. It can appear in isolation in the composition or in combination with other spheres or geometric forms, as is the case of this work from the BBVA Collection. This silkscreen from 1976 comes from a portfolio published by Diputación Provincial de Teruel which included works by various artists from Teruel: Miguel Ángel Encuentra (1951), José Lamiel (1924-2020), Gonzalo Tena (1950), Enrique Trullenque (1951-1990), Salvador Victoria, José Gonzalvo (1929-2010) and Pablo Serrano (1908-1985).

Victoria made this silkscreen using his preferred method in printmaking: building up levels of paint that allow the ink of the underlying layers to be appreciated. This method produces a series of delicate glazes which lend the piece a sense of volume, bringing it closer to the dimension of the beholder. Unlike the flat inks of his silkscreens from the early-seventies, here Victoria uses a new way of applying paint. This new method creates a certain roughness on the surface, recalling his matter-based paintings from the fifties and foreshadowing his later work, in which the brushwork is blurred and the gesture and material once again take on key importance. This work combines the suspended circular form, so characteristic of his output from the seventies, with a vertical stripe that balances the composition. The use of simplified geometric forms evinces his search for maximum visual purity.