Pablo Palazuelo is one of the key figures of twentieth-century abstraction in Spain. The inventor of what is often called , he is known for his elegant and refined use of basic geometric shapes which he freely combines to create abstract representations of his surrounding world.
After graduating in Architecture from the Oxford School of Arts and Crafts (1933-1936), Palazuelo moved back to Madrid, where, following the Spanish Civil War in which he took part as an air force pilot, he reoriented his career towards painting and later sculpture. His experimentation led him to pure, geometric and mathematical abstraction in which one can discern the influence of the Cubist painting of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), and more particularly of Paul Klee (1879-1940).
In 1948 he won a scholarship from the French Government, thanks to which he was able to move to Paris. His time there was key to the development of an extremely analytic creative process which evinces the theoretical and methodical foundations of his practice. Most of the time, this process began with a preliminary sketch on paper that the artist used as a regulating model to compose the works making up each family—the term he used for his series. This methodology may have had its origin in the notes he made about the of the tablecloths in the bistrot he frequented during this time in Paris.
These meticulous studies led to compositions made up of organic profiles that expand over the surface of the paper, masterfully and harmoniously combining straight and curved lines.

The family of gouaches Champ, from 1964, to which this work in the BBVA Collection belongs, was created from a sketch that functions as the geometric model for the whole body of work, a sketch Palazuelo then amended and transformed for each individual composition. Hence, all the pieces making up the suite could be overlapped and fitted together like in a jigsaw puzzle.
In Champ I, Palazuelo softened the contours, producing a highly elegant and simple composition whose forms recall the subtlety of Oriental calligraphy. The area at the top, rendered in a solid colour, instils a delicate compositional rhythm to the whole and balances the work. Worth highlighting is the dull greyish-brown colour of the piece, and very especially the singular use of , remitting to the tellurian and earthy concepts also hinted at in the title of the work Champ (Field). Here, Palazuelo did not limit himself to just showing an of areas of solid colour, as he tends to do in his work: he applies the in a particular manner, creating on the paper a dimensional illusion reminiscent of the aerial view of geographic volumes. The result is an evocation of an aerial landscape of sorts, seemingly crossed by fluvial forms, which could be interpreted as the abstract representation of views he might have seen during the Spanish Civil War, in which he took part as an air force pilot.