Fernando Zóbel was a key figure in the renewal of twentieth-century visual arts in Spain, not only for the role he played as an excellent abstract painter, but also as a collector and cultural promoter. His extraordinary endeavour to support and disseminate the work of other artists from his generation encouraged him, together with Gustavo Torner (1925) and Gerardo Rueda (1926-1996), to found the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca in 1966, one of the earliest private initiatives to bring non-figurative art into Spain.

Throughout his life’s work, Zóbel developed a highly personal language that is not easy to classify within the various movements in Spanish art during the second half of the twentieth century. He started painting reproductions of customs and manners scenes from his home country, the Philippines. However, around the mid-1950s, his discovery of US encouraged him to explore the path of abstraction. After an early period devoted to visual experimentation, in the 1970s he reached his maturity as an artist, in a period defined by an exquisite simplification of colour and form which is the outcome of thoughtful analysis and a re-interpretation of reality. It is worth underscoring that, despite their apparent simplicity and spontaneity, Zóbel’s paintings conceal a meticulous process of creation following the method of notes-drawing-sketch-painting that motivated him to study in advance and in great detail all the elements informing the final work.

Manantial de las Angustias [Source of Anxieties] is a significant example of Zóbel’s work from the 1970s, when he created his Serie Blanca and his style was fully consolidated. At the time he lent great importance to the representation of nature from an individual perspective, favouring the evocation of a landscape over truthful depiction. Here we can see how Zóbel pared down his palette to two fully balanced tones. In the background, the artist used the light range to deliver greater luminosity, using the darker scale to create volumes and give the composition a sense of dynamism and depth. Worth underlining is the quick brushwork, reminiscent of Oriental calligraphy, one of Zóbel’s main sources of inspiration. Those strokes, highly characteristic of the artist’s output at the time, almost seem to emerge from a kind of mist. This technique evokes the sfumato practiced by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), reminding us of the artist’s insight and knowledge of Art History, particularly the Renaissance.