In this brilliantly executed work, the painting veers towards abstraction with the head made with a single continuous stroke and with analytic, quasi-minimalist severity.

A painter, sculptor and printmaker, Rafael Canogar is one of the unquestioned masters of Spanish contemporary art. He was a disciple of Ascensio Martiarena (1889-1966) in San Sebastian, where he spent his childhood, and later of Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969) after settling in Madrid in 1948. In 1957 he was involved in the founding of the El Paso group, of which he was a member until it disbanded in 1960.

Unlike other artists from his generation, his work is hard to classify within a particular style. However, there are three elements that run throughout his whole body of work: matter, colour and gesture. Canogar harnesses them to create his own personal visual language, with abstraction and figuration coexisting side by side and alternating throughout his many years of practice.

In 1983 Canogar reintroduced figurative elements in his works, undertaking a series of Heads to which this work from 1985 belongs. In it, the artist combines a barely sketched outline with planes of colour, made with dense vigorous brushwork and with . It is a strikingly schematic representation of the human being, here seen “as an archetype or totem.”

In his head paintings Canogar returns to the primitive masks the historical avant-gardes were so fond of, but instead of referencing the originals he revisits the interpretations of them found in works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) and very especially by Julio González (1876-1942), and in fact he dedicated a whole series of homage-paintings to González’s iron masks.