Salvador Victoria’s first steps in painting led to a body of work made up primarily of figurative works containing some geometric echoes. In 1956 he travelled to Paris, drawn to the city’s vibrant cultural scene, in which he became actively involved. In Paris he entered into contact with the avant-garde movements of the time, with a particular interest in art informel, the French variant of Informalismo, and its penchant for matter and colour. Victoria began to incorporate the principles of that movement into his practice, reinterpreting it in his works in a highly personal way.

In his Paris years the artist was an assiduous visitor to exhibitions and further reinforced his knowledge of art by reading the work of key theorists, like Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), including Point and Line to Plane and Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky’s reflections on geometric forms, and particularly the circle, would exert an indelible conceptual influence on Victoria’s future practice.

After returning to Madrid in 1965, Salvador Victoria began to move away from Informalismo. He gradually replaced tempera with oil paint, and created a body of work made up by collages of canvas cut with a curvilinear line which were called poetic reliefs. Little by little he abandoned as he moved towards a greater use of oil on board to create a volumetric cosmos of spheres, cones and pyramids.

In the 1970s, he completely divested his works of the last informel elements and his compositions grew more hieratic and categorical. These new forms he began to develop would remain part of his practice until his death. The artist himself defined his painting as follows: within

 Abstract Expressionism 

This contemporary painting movement emerged within the field of abstraction in the 1940s in the United States, from where it spread worldwide. Rooted in similar premises and postulates as Surrealism, the Abstract Expressionist artists regarded the act of painting as a spontaneous and unconscious activity, a dynamic bodily action divested of any kind of prior planning. The works belonging to this movement are defined by the use of pure, vibrant primary colours that convey a profound sense of freedom. The movement’s main pioneers were, among others, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) and Hans Hoffman (1880-1966). Leading Spanish exponents of the movement are Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) and José Guerrero (1914-1991), who lived for some time in New York City, where they were in first-hand contact with the many artistic innovations taking place there around that time.

, drawn towards matter and signs (…) built on colour (…), and with a more open and profound expressive clarity.

As this refined piece from the BBVA Collection shows, the gesturality of expressionism gives way to an incipient geometrization which the artist called symmetric geometry. The piece is the prelude of a set of paintings in which Victoria worked in the 1970s that combine the circle with what he called tapes: bands of colour horizontally crossing the canvas and counteracting the formal cogency of the circumference.

Since the late 1960s, the circle became a constant in the artist’s practice, creating in each work a cosmos of sorts that irradiates powerful energy. Sometimes, as we can see in this piece, the circle is generated by superimposing lines in space, while other times it rises like a sun on the horizon. The curved line gains greater weight and the succession of curves seems to configure a void which, in turn, generates space.

This work from the BBVA Collection brings together signature formal elements of Salvador Victoria’s practice with his totally poetic approach to art and painting.