MIGUEL ÁNGEL CAMPANO
Madrid, (Spain) 1948-2018 Cercedilla (Spain)

He began as a student of architecture and fine art in Madrid and Valencia, starting to paint in an automatist manner (1969). He soon moved on to a more rational language, in connection with the Cuenca group, and this work was shown in various exhibitions in the early seventies (Sala Cité, Valencia, 1971) and in the exhibition La Ventana (Iolas-Velasco, Madrid, 1974). From 1976 to 1977 he lived in Paris, where he moved away from rigid geometrical patterns and absorbed the teaching of the American Abstract Expressionist painters, especially Motherwell. His new work was exhibited at the Galería Juana Mordó in 1979, before his return to Paris in 1980. That year he started on the series Las vocales (The Vowels), based on poetry by Rimbaud, which was shown at Juana de Aizpuru (1980) and Antonio Machón (1984). This series marked the beginning of a period that lasted until 1992, in which Campano became interested in the French cultural tradition, making European sensibility compatible with American Abstract Expressionism.
Those years included several overlapping series dealing with monographic themes, particularly his dialogue with Cézanne and Cézanne’s Provence landscapes between 1980 and 1982, in the series Montañas (Mountains), and with Poussin, through variations and analysis of his work, specifically the paintings in Poussin’s series The Four Seasons, such as El diluvio (The Flood), 1980-82 based on Poussin’s The Flood (Winter), La Grappa (Grappa), 1985-86, based on Autumn, and Ruth y Booz (Ruth and Booz), 1990-92, based on The Summer (Ruth and Boaz). At the same time as working on these series, Campano made other approaches to themes of tradition, such as Omphalos, 1984, or Natures-mortes (Still-lifes) and Nature-Paysages (Nature Landscapes), 1987-89, as well as producing an extensive range of drawings and collages. The work he produced in this decade was exhibited at the IVAM in 1990. In 1993 the Galeria Maior in Pollença and the Galería Juana de Aizpuru exhibited his new series, which some have called the Serie Negra (Black Series), because it consists of paintings that show isolated, angular black forms and ovaloid figures on white canvases. In 1994 he travelled to India, and again in 1995, and his paintings began to acquire Indian names and also, subsequently, figures from that context. The geometrical combinations became more variegated, absorbing some of the ornamental principles of that tradition (Galeria Carles Taché, Barcelona, 1995), incorporating colour once again. In 1996 he was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize. In 1998 Campano began working on a series consisting of thousands of items consisting of small irregular squares with a black spot on unprimed canvas (Galeria Maior in Pollença, 1998, and Palacio de Velázquez, 1999). He died in Cercedilla (Madrid) on August 5, 2018.