Álvaro Delgado’s style is characterised by his evolution from his early work, influenced by Goya, Velázquez and Rembrandt to the bases of expressionism, which he reached through the work of Vincent van Gogh, Oskar Kokoschka, Georges Rouault, Chaim Soutine, Jean Dubuffet and Paul Klee. However, his work is above all associated with the style that he professes in favour of formal freedom, along with his insistence to unmask the most obscure and expressive aspects of light and colour, the development of critical and social themes and the fostering of a language that is both personal and formally modern and at the same time firmly positioned at the antipodes of what might be considered ‘official’ art.

These three works by Delgado in the Banco de España Collection are clear examples of two of the genres he adopted during his artistic career. On the one hand, we have the landscape genre, represented by a view of a harbour – possibly in Asturias, given the artist’s long sojourn in Navia from 1955 onwards, in which he uses a pallet of greens and greys and a style reminiscent of cubism. There are also two works from the genre of portraiture, one of which shows the influence of expressionism and the artist’s interest in offering a psychological study of the sitter (in this case, Juan Barjola) and another from the mid-1980s, of a picador’s assistant, influenced by a definite expressionist figuration. That figuration is characterised by the nimbleness and bold impromptu of his brush strokes, the austerity of his colour range and the execution, which clearly reveals links with the precepts of abstract expressionism. As the artist admitted in his maiden speech to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the best way of achieving with stark expressiveness the most defining traits of the sitter is to address the task as if it were a serial essay-oriented approach to the intimacy of the person, as evidenced by the two works discussed here.

Frederic Montornés