In the mid ’70s an idiosyncratic figuration surfaced amid the abstraction then prevalent in Spanish art, an abstraction still very much under the influence of American Abstract Expressionism and, to a lesser extent, under the dictates of the French “support/surface” tendency. Carlos Franco, born in 1951 and unfortunately little known internationally, is an early representative of this movement, one of a group of painters in Madrid who instigated a provocative gallery of neofigurative images that spoke with vitality of everyday life as well as of history.

Franco has continued to develop in this