Unhappy with the rigid constraints imposed by the academic approach to learning art, Feliciano dropped out and embraced the practice of sculpture full time. Nevertheless, his creative process has always been driven by the force of formal experimentation.
 
In his early stages he lent great importance to iron, to the extent that it almost became an obsession for him. Fire has a major role to play in his work with iron, and the artist works and casts this primeval element as if it were clay, modelling and altering its form while the incandescence material still allows it.
 
After some initial trials with iron sheets, which he learned to work with in the metal workshops of Navalcarnero, he began to build some organic and geologic objects that came out of a stone pedestal, with cracks and crevices providing a glimpse of the space lying behind the work, thus eliciting a dialogue between iron and space.
 
Feliciano created blocks with fragments of thick metal sheets, and then built forms with them by bringing together pieces and generating the volumes making up the work itself. The fact that they consist of elements that reveal the space behind them enhances the light, colour and the objects surrounding the work and increases the perceptual possibilities.
 
The BBVA Collection has two examples from this period in its holdings: an aerial piece from 1964 which conveys a figure half way between the lightness of a bird and vegetal forms through a superimposition of iron sheets; and this Pareja (Couple) from 1960, in which form has been reduced to bare lines.
 
With a sketchy figurative approach, the work depicts a life-size representation of a man and a woman, using a hollow cast, suggesting volume through a convex void. The work was made using the sheet-beating technique also used by Gargallo.
 
Clearly figurative and hesitatingly expressionistic, the work opened a path that many sculptors from his generation would follow in the transition from figuration to abstraction.