`El paso´ in Madrid and Barcelona: Canogar & Millares

We will have the chance to admire in Madrid and Barcelona two exhibitions of the most relevant figures of El Paso group, avant- garde movement created in 1957. These artists are Manolo Millares and Rafael Canogar.

Rafael Canogar was born in Toledo in 1935 and he approached painting when he was 14, with the support of the master Vázquez Díaz. He travelled to Paris and met the Informalism, a current that he wanted to developed because of the freedom it enabled. Years after, he got close to Luis Feito and Manolo Millares, among others, and set on El Paso group. Canogar pursues the greatest expressiveness with the minimum elements, giving them dynamism and power. Manolo Millares (Gran Canaria, 1926- Madrid, 1972) started to paint through self-study being inspired by surrealism and indigenous cultures from the Island. Later, he began to use burlap surfaces that he cut, broke and drilled. The same as Canogar does, he enhanced the matter as an expressive vehicle, using in his palette brown, black, red and white. 

Manel Mayoral Gallery in Barcelona will host until the 25th of July the exhibition ´Millares: building bridges, not walls´, that put on eye on the canarian artist´s artwork and is curated by the theoric Alfonso de la Torre and the art historian Elena Sorokina. It shows MIllares´ most famous pieces, such as `Painting 32´ (1957-58), some of his anthropomorphic `homúnculos´, and two marvellous triptychs, one of them: ´Divertimentos para un políptico (1963)´, that is part of the permanent collection of the Antonio Pérez de Cuenca´s Foundation. It was in 1976 when  the last retrospective from this artist was made. As Alfonso de la Torre says:  “this exhibition presents Millares´obsessions”.

Madrid highlights the figure of Rafael Canogar, an artist from Toledo. CEART (Tomás y Valiente Art Centre) in Fuenlabrada hosts the exhibition `Yesterday, today: Rafael Canogar´, that opens to the public until the 22nd of July. It is a retrospective of 60 paintings that proposes a tour through the artist's passionate life and artwork. This exhibition is organised in sections that comprise from the beginning of El Paso group to his most recent works, big pieces of saturated lights and drawn colours.

These exhibitions provide the keys for understanding the avant-garde movement El paso. Luis Feito, Juana Francés, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Suárez, Antonio Saura y Pablo Serrano were some other participants of this collective. Thanks to Millares and Canogar we can experiment an approach to postwar painting in Spain and its revolutionary plastic features.

Source: http://www.art-madrid.com