When we look over the artistic career of José Caballero, our initial impression is that we are seeing the work of two different artists: a Surrealist of great technical precision, and an advocate of Art Informel whose abstraction never completely severed its ties to figuration. However, upon closer inspection we realise that these two styles, which at first might seem so disparate, actually make perfect sense. Caballero was one of the few Spanish artists who, like the painters of American Abstract Expressionism, arrived at matterly abstraction by way of Surrealism.

Although he started studying industrial engineering in Madrid, in 1930 he met Daniel Vázquez Díaz in Huelva while he was painting frescoes in the monastery at La Rábida. The master was destined to play a vital role in his development as an artist—Caballero joined his workshop staff—and as a person, for it was through Vázquez Díaz that he was able to join the group of intellectuals orbiting round the Residencia de Estudiantes. In 1934, Federico García Lorca took him on at the La Barraca University Theatre, for which Caballero created various posters and set designs. It was also around this time that he began contributing to illustrated magazines and forged relationships with several painter-poets (in addition to Lorca, Neruda and Alberti). His output during the 1930s was closely linked to Surrealism; his creations proved that he possessed what García Lorca called a profound poetic imagination, particularly evident in the ink drawings made between 1934 and 1937.

At the end of the Civil War, Caballero found himself in an impoverished Madrid with most of his friends dead or in prison. His production diminished substantially in the 1940s because painting was a painful return to the past. In 1950 the artist made a conscious decision to move past Surrealism and explore new expressive media. That was the year of his first solo exhibition at Galería Clan and the beginning of what may seem like a brand-new life.

After an early abstract phase dominated by the line, the painter developed his own personal brand of "informalist" poetics. In his works from the late 1960s and 70s, compositions were reduced to the essential, and he began using what would become Caballero's quintessential form and the most defining feature of his painting: the circle. We see this in Doble espacio [Double Space], where the painter used division to develop the two signature characteristics of his abstraction: a marked gesturality and an emphasis on matter, materialised here as a collage with a disc of esparto grass. Even while moving in this abstract universe, the painter did not sever his ties to figuration, using titles to connect with the real world. La larga noche circular de Nazim Hikmet [The Long Circular Night of Nazim Hikmet], in which Caballero denounced the persecution of the Turkish poet and playwright, and Por la ardiente meseta amarilla me acuerdo de Alberto Sánchez [On the Blazing Yellow Plateau I Remember Alberto Sánchez], one of his many tributes to the sculptor whom he had met in the 1930s, are two clear examples of this manner of emphasising reality in an abstract code. [Inés Vallejo]