20th Century Spanish

This self-taught artist started working within the field of sculpture, taking the traditional forms from Galician art as his bedrock reference. Thanks to a scholarship from the Provincial Council of Lugo, he moved to Madrid, where he joined the group known as the

 School of Madrid 

or Young School of Madrid, is a term coined by the art dealer and bookseller Karl Buchholz and the art critic Manuel Sánchez Camargo to name the group of Spanish painters—many of them from the Second

 School of Vallecas 

(1927-1936) founded in 1927 by Benjamín Palencia and Alberto Sánchez with the purpose of renewing Spanish art in line with what was happening elsewhere in Europe. Landscape became the main subject matter of this school, albeit a highly sober landscape influenced by Hispanic primitivism, fauvist colour, a surrealist approach and cubist order. The starting point was the arid, barren land on the outskirts of Madrid in the direction of Toledo, stripped of any superfluous object and worked with economic brushwork and a palette of earthy tones. This take on landscape straddled tradition and modernism. The School of Vallecas disbanded with the outbreak of the Civil War, although it was the only school to rise from its ashes, reborn in the Second School of Vallecas (1939-1942).

—who took part in the group exhibition held in 1945 at Galería Buchholz in Madrid. This group has sometimes been considered a mere commercial project driven by art critics and gallery owners with a view to creating a market for landscape painting.

. Though he always refused to explain his influences, he did confess his admiration for Georges Braque (1882-1963), as well as for his contemporaries Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja (1905-1988) and Cristina Mallo (1905-1989), with whom he regularly met in the intellectual and literary gatherings at Café Gijón when he first arrived to Madrid.

The recipient of countless awards, he started off within the confines of figuration, with landscapes and scenes set in the countryside, before eventually evolving towards abstraction.

Except for a few instances, his painting is largely monochrome, particularly within the spectrum of greys. His landscapes seem to appear through a dense mist in which formal references are almost non-existent.