20th-21st Century Spanish

Based on an understated geometric structure and a concern for space, Peyró Roggen’s work could be located somewhere between Rationalism and Expressionism.

The artist began his training under the ceramic artist Enric Mestre (1936), a key influence on his practice. Indeed, Peyró Roggen picked up from Mestre an exacting language based on the properties of clay and on the effects of light, very characteristic of the Valencian school to which his early phase ought to be ascribed.

In the late 1970s he moved away from social concerns, focusing on the use of matter and geometric order. It was at this time that he began to theorise on the playful aspect of painting and the very fact of painting itself—which he viewed as autonomous—and on its elements and the codes of representation on a flat surface.

In the early 1980s, he abandoned chromatic austerity, more in the tradition of the movement, and took up a brand of painting that he continues working with in the present, combining constructivist art with lively colours evocative of the painting of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970).

Apart from painting, in 1984 the artist created drawings and illustrations for the collection of poems titled La lluvia funde el bosque and for the covers of books by José Luis Parra and Sergio Pitol.

Since 1991 he has exhibited in the ARCO art fair with Galería i Leonarte. In 2004, Sala Parpalló organised a retrospective of his work at the MuVIM, Valencia.