Paper Paths 1951-1991 It is the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name, organized by el Círculo de Bellas Artes, from the work on paper by José Caballero (Huelva, 1915-Madrid, 1991), who began his career in the mid-thirties under the powerful influence of surrealism to end up being one of the most genuine exponents of the Spanish abstract generation of the second half of the twentieth century. Paper paths It consists of more than two hundred works on paper that span forty years of the artist's creativity, from the early fifties, when he returned definitively to painting after a period mainly dedicated to book illustration and stage set design, until the end of his days.

As Francisco Calvo Serraller and Jesús Cámara, the exhibition's curator, make abundantly clear in their essays, Caballero's "paper paths" run parallel to the evolution of his painting. In both areas, a shift away from figurative impulses and an increasingly pronounced taste for abstraction are evident, a domain in which he never ceased to experiment. Another of his great passions, of paramount importance in the realm of drawing, is the investigation of materials, an endless process in which certain technical discoveries inevitably shape his graphic solutions.

From the figurative style with a strong surrealist influence in his early work to the orientalizing and minimalist graphic style of his later period, and including his exploration of materials and surfaces that characterized his work in the 1960s, José Caballero never ceased to evolve and grow as an artist. A nonconformist and protean, he traced a path of exceptional rigor and ambition that we can now revisit thanks to this extensive and generous retrospective of his work on paper. It is no coincidence that these "paths" often lead us back to his studio, the intimate space where many of the studies and sketches for his large-format paintings originated.