The creative career path of Rafael Canogar is one long process of constant transformation, which is why critics tend to talk about "Canogar's painting styles" in the plural.

His early training took place in the studio of Daniel Vázquez Díaz, a master who trained several of the painters that would lead the avant-garde and modernity in Spain in the 1950s. At "Don Daniel's" studio, learning was based on the principles of modernity and did not conform to the dictates of academic doctrine.

In these initial years, Canogar produced landscapes constructed in accordance with his master's concept of artistic representation. Yet even these early works reveal that Canogar was already leaning towards a style of painting identified with modernity. Around 1955, the artist began investigating the field of abstraction. His first abstract works denote a particular interest in matter and ordering the different colour fields. Canogar soon gave up this experimentation and moved towards a radical expressivity based on spontaneous gestures and a reduced palette that underscored the bellicose nature of the image. In 1957, he and a number of fellow artists founded the El Paso group. His painting accurately captured the collective's artistic ideals: expressivity, limited colour and an aggressively critical attitude towards the socio-political situation at the time.

However, for Canogar abstraction was not a doctrine or language which, once embraced, could never be abandoned. There are many cases of painters who, after an initial figurative phase, moved on to abstraction and remained there for the rest of their creative lives. Canogar was one of them, but unlike most his painting returned to figuration, veered towards abstraction, and returned to figuration yet again. Abstraction and figuration are not independent, self-contained tendencies but forms of expression to which artists turn depending on their desire to experiment at any given time.

When he turned away from Art Informel in 1964, Canogar began to make figurative paintings and sculptures openly critical of his social and political reality. After that point his output changed repeatedly, ranging from expressively minimal works to an essential figurative conception of painting. In 1987 he painted Homenaje a Van Gogh [Homage to Van Gogh], a work in which Canogar offers, as in his series of masks, an artistic reflection on models and archetypes of contemporary art. In this piece figurative references have been reduced to a minimum, transformed into what the painter believed was the most fitting tribute to the Dutch artist: the representation of the expressivity of painting.

Canogar's later work has explored different paths, confirming his understanding of painting as an activity in constant evolution. [Víctor Nieto Alcaide]