The painting by Rafael Canogar (Toledo, Spain, 1935) is an aesthetic proposal between the boundaries of sensitivity and reason. His aesthetic research has been radical and risky. The radicality with which Canogar has risen in his adventure, his unquestionable decision to reach the limit without being afraid of emptiness, the fall, sure of himself and his work, are a clear example of how, moral and artistic intrepidity Already pointed to Juan Eduardo Cirlot in 1961: "Canogar's work is developed with extraordinary coherence in a dangerous period, in which the temptation to informalism has been overcome on many occasions, until all in gifted artists, in the pictorial essences ". The work of Canogar surprises, is material, poetic; It is not an idea, but a sensation of cosmic vibrations that manifest languages. His artistic adventure still does not end and, in full maturity, the artist does not stop evolving, growing up with increasingly surprising works.
Geometric shapes, signs, volumes that make up a plastic balance. Composition means conjunction of concepts: abstraction and informalism. The first rejects, denies and destroys the figure: desecration that we see, we touch, we listen. The second is amazing. Both seduce, they refuse to each other. Its expressive power is precisely the impossibility of saying. Painting is silence, an irruption of reality. From this perspective, we can observe the work of Canogar and be able to go beyond itself.
Evokes mythologies and fables, that is, history itself, time struggle against himself. Contradiction of elements: wood and paper, shape and line, light and space. Confrontation of contradictory duals. Canogar converges between forces, suspends gravitations, areas of poetic silence. The pictorial exploration is solved in the perforation of poetry. Myth and reality Understanding is listening, understanding what the space summons. The artist, says Octavio Paz, is the universal translator. [...]

The art of Rafael Canogar is echo, pilgrimage and brilliance. Painting is, as I said before, balance, convergence. Pact and pause. Magic - Cassirer says - is the fraternity of living beings, because it is based on the belief of an energy or a universal fluid. Canogar is the heir of this tradition and knows the silence. The subject is his unpublished voice.

Painting has no inheritance: there is affinity, conquest. Canogar took, discovered and transformed. This statement confirms, defines. His painting is a spontaneous response to the reality of our historical moment, an encounter and a distraction with modern art are noticed in all their eras. Each painting of the artist is a sign of space and each symbol is a form, communication that we must decipher. His recent work is an emblem - a poetic - mystic, alchemy that converges between distant balances, a transit that is part of the circular process of the pictorial work. Each of the works of Canogar is, as an endless void, a diverse and poetic sign of space that makes me imagine an artistic path capable of transforming and being born without aesthetic features or historical limits. Rarely in the history of contemporary art, an artist can reinvent himself as Rafael Canogar has done over these more than fifty years of plastic production.

Miguel Ángel Muñoz
Commissioner