Fernando Zóbel is widely recognised as one of the best exponents of Spanish abstract painting. Although a Filipino by birth, he was always passionate about Spain, and more specifically about Cuenca, the city where he co-founded, together with Gustavo Torner and Gerardo Rueda, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, which was officially opened in 1966.

For a proper understanding of Zóbel’s art it is critical to know that he was an expert in Oriental calligraphy and a champion of the artistic value of that discipline. That is probably the reason why his work has an almost monochromatic palette, occasionally slightly expanded with subdued, soft colours. The influence of calligraphy can also be intuited in the feeling of mysterious writing conveyed by his linear black areas.

Zóbel fully ascribed to Rothko’s theory and use of colour. Equally noteworthy in his work is the use of photography, not as a model but rather as a way of capturing or compiling images. He took photos merely to stimulate his memory, for he found the colour of photography excessively material and fake.

Horizonte, from 1970, could be seen as a prelude to his series on the river Jucar, which he began in Oxford in the early 1970s, when he made some sketches of a lake on a typical wet and rainy English day. So, what started as a simple memory became an obsession that took the river Jucar as it passed through Cuenca as the motif he would repeat virtually until his demise in 1984.

Zóbel’s working method is by no means improvised or spontaneous. The artist used to study each movement in the landscape, its colours and lights, its structure, volumes, forms, and rhythms in great detail. He looked at it from a distance and close up, during various seasons of the years, with and without people, so as to capture the essence of the place and remove all accessories.

His works do not depict a specific landscape as such. Instead they are the organisation and conclusion of a number of emotions, feelings and expressions the artist experiences when looking at it. That is why, when looked at close up, we can see in them the hint of the grid Zóbel used to organise his areas of colour, which respond primarily to reason.