Mompó is one of the leading figures of Spanish abstract painting of the 1960s. He has a personal style that combines the Valencian tradition in the use of light with avant-garde styles from synthetic cubism to the sign painting of Paul Klee and Joan Miró and European art informel. Mompó inherited his vocation from his father, who was a painter and drawing teacher. When he was 13 years old, Mompó joined the Valencia School of Arts and Crafts (1940-1942) and two years later he moved to the San Carlos Fine Arts School in the same city (1943-1949), where he met Javier Clavo, who was a decisive influence in Mompó’s break with academicism. He decided to travel to Paris in 1950, where he remained for six months. This period was fundamental in the evolution and development of his painting. He came into contact with the work of the Cubists, of artists such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, but above all Klee and Miró. Mompó would later live in Rome as the holder of a scholarship to the Spanish Academy in 1954; the following year, he moved to Holland and returned to Spain in 1957. His painting at that time moved away from analytical cubism and Klee’s work, into compositions that tended to the synthetic, with simplified lines and expanses of colour. During the 1960s, his work would progressively veer off into a personal sign language that was essentially graphic and had a certain childlike spontaneity, turning the ordinariness of life into a constructive synthesis of reality reduced to its essence. His first visit to Ibiza in 1963 introduced another defining element into his work: light expressed through white backgrounds, which dominated in his painting. The ongoing dematerialisation of his works culminated in the Alamos series (1977-1982), whose title refers to the town in Mallorca where he lived from 1970. In this series he moves synthesised colour forms over the transparent Perspex surface that he uses as a medium, freeing and integrating them into real space.

After his first solo show in 1954, Mompó was a constant presence on the domestic scene and he took part in the opening exhibition of the Juana Mordó Gallery in Madrid in 1964, to which he was linked. He also exhibited in European galleries in Rotterdam, Lisbon, Munich, Dusseldorf and Helsinki and in group shows on Spanish art in Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, Brussels, New York and Tokyo. Anthologies of his work include those organised by the Caracas Fine Arts Museum (1982); the Parpalló Exhibition Room (Valencia, 1984); the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 1991); the Amós Salvador Exhibition Room (Logroño, 1997); the Pablo Serrano Museum (Zaragoza, 2001); and the Spanish Abstract Art Museum (Cuenca, 2002). His prizes include the UNESCO Prize at the Venice Bienniale (1968), the National Award for Plastic Arts (1984) and, posthumously, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (1992).

Roberto Díaz