Salvador Victoria was an artist committed with the society of his time. Keen to renew the visual arts in consonance with the needs of the contemporary world, he employed an abstract language to explore the representation of metaphysical universes that help us to think about the new reality.

Born in Teruel, on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he moved with his family to Valencia, where he studied at the city’s San Carlos Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There he coincided with important Spanish artists, like Juan Genovés (1930-2020), Eusebio Sempere (1923-1985) or Manuel Hernández Mompó (1927-1992). He became acquainted with European abstraction during a short sojourn in Ibiza and then, in 1956, he travelled to Paris, drawn to the city’s vibrant cultural scene, in which he became actively involved. There 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. His time in Paris gave him a first-hand insight into the contemporary movements and the abstract art of the time, an experience Victoria rounded off with his readings of key writings on non-figurative arts, like Point and Line to Plane and Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and On Modern Art, by Paul Klee (1879-1940). Their focus on the purely formal aspects of art exerted a major influence on his later work.

In 1964, following his return to Madrid, the artist began a new period defined by so-called poetic reliefs. With this body of work, made by folding sheets of poster board prepared with tempera, Victoria explored a new visual spatiality and began to investigate the notion of overlayering which he would continue to develop throughout the rest of his career.

In the late 1960s, the poster boards gave way to a monochrome period that foreshadowed his future metaphysical cosmos. The BBVA Collection has two works from 1969 belonging to that body of monochrome works. Created by gluing layers of fabric on the canvas, the main trait of these paintings is the gradual dissolution of forms and the increasing relevance of the circle. The combination of various strata of fabric gives the painterly space a dimension that opens up new visual and conceptual possibilities. The contours become more blurred and the shapes, suspended around the surface of the canvas, give rise to a delicate movement that adds rhythm to the composition. The works from this period, which seem to radiate light from within, also speak of the influence of Luminism, acquired during his formative years of training in Valencia.

Throughout his life Victoria pursued a tireless quest for a painting of great spiritual purity which would lead to his iconic metaphysical universes from the 1970s. This work, in which one can note the gradual dissolution of figures and the increasing prominence of the circle, demonstrates that the process had already started in the previous decade.