Francisco Farreras studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, receiving instruction from Vázquez Díaz and Ramón Stolz. In the early 1950s he travelled to Paris thanks to a grant from the Institut Français and later visited London and the Netherlands. His first exhibitions were held at Galería Biosca in Madrid and the Hispano-American Art Biennial of 1951, an event that marked a major turning point in Spanish art. He also showed his work in Paris and at the Venice Biennale, confirming his early success in exhibition circles. After settling down in Spain in 1955, Farreras accepted commissions to create mural paintings, mosaics and stained-glass windows for public and religious buildings which allowed him to establish a productive collaboration with the architect Miguel Fisac and the sculptor José Luis Sánchez. As the 1950s wore on, his work evolved from geometrising figuration to geometric abstraction, and he conducted matter-based experiments with marble dust and alkyl. In 1959 he began experimenting with tissue paper, pasting it on a black panel in successive layers to create a sensation of light and transparency in varying degrees. Matter, always subtle and never aggressive, became the fundamental protagonist of his work.

In 1963 Farreras moved to New York, where he lived for two years, and on returning to Spain he settled in Madrid once again. After 1965 the compositional forms of his pictures became more compact and geometrically regular, often offering a double game or confrontation and a transition from darker to lighter colours. In the late 1960s he began combining different types of cardboard to create an interplay of textures, as we see in Collage 410. El doncel [Collage 410: The Squire]. Geometry started to become more visible, and the artist began to show a preference for elongated rectangular forms (Collage) and later for spherical shapes (Homenaje a Henry Moore [Homage to Henry Moore]). Moving into the 1970s, Farreras's works shifted their attention to bandage-like strips and paper-wrapped parcels with a very obvious texture. The elements in these compositions are often off-centre or tilted, reflecting a desire to test every possible form of construction in space, as illustrated by the splendid collages from these years in the Banco Santander Collection: Collage 702, Collage 741 and Collage 732. For Farreras, collage is a tool for attaining plastic subtlety. The artist "paints" by layering papers in different tones but does not actually use oils, as we see in his 1977 Composición [Composition]. At that time he also opened the door to large-format works, in which the echoes of Art Informel were replaced by more concrete forms and the palette grew lighter, as in Un lecho para María Sabina [A Bed for María Sabina]. In the 1980s and 90s he entered a new phase of volumetric works or coudrages, using plywood filled with foam rubber and covered with stitched or glued cloth to create superimposed planes, taut surfaces, wrinkles and hollows that give the impression of relief. [Genoveva Tusell García]