Miguel Angel Campano. Alicia Chillida

Campano's pictorial work constituted in the eighties, together with Ferran García Sevilla, Sicilia, Broto and Barceló, an essential point of reference in what was considered the renovation of Spanish painting.

The tension between figuration and abstraction acquires in his work a decisive experimental component; with the aim of producing the breakdown and rupture of style, the artist undertakes a work of revision of the pictorial tradition, in which the starting point are some specific works and themes of French painting, from Delacroix and Poussin to Cézanne. From these assumptions, Campano undertakes the construction of a radicalized aesthetic attitude, on which converge some of the most energetic lines of the minimalist tradition and the gestural variants of Kline and Motherwell, together with allusions to the historical constructivist and suprematist avant-gardes.

At a time when painting is questioned from outside its own values, Campano's work becomes a privileged place of experimentation and transgression, where the artist puts into practice a permanent questioning of painting from within painting itself, and it is fundamentally in the last stage of his production, which began in 1991, where these approaches are most vigorously appreciated.

This exhibition aims to highlight the depth and radicalism of his artistic approaches, as well as to illustrate the moments of transition that mark new inflections and discoveries in the way of facing the pictorial fact.

The exhibition starts with the paintings of the series Ruth and Boaz of 1991, inspired by the painting L'Été Poussin, which formally open the way to a new way of assuming the painting and the pictorial space, giving rise to the series of structures of black paint fields on the neutral background of the canvas of the mid-nineties. The journey through the artist's work continues with his series influenced by the painter's stay in India, and concludes with the production of the years 1997-1998, where color acquires a renewed protagonism.

An important aspect of this exhibition is the confrontation of the pictorial work with the architecture of the Palacio de Velázquez. The work St. Martin Mosaic, 1998 y Elias (D'après Daniel Buren)The new exhibition, 1996-99, composed of a large number of pieces, takes possession of the eastern towers of the palace, giving the space a new visual and spiritual dimension.