El Paso, Vanguardia y Compromiso

El Paso was the most emblematic art group in the 20th-century Spanish avant-garde. In its day, it sparked a profound aesthetic and artistic renewal of wide-reaching significance, impacting the validity of a current classified as part of informalism and the poetics of art autre. El Paso must be credited with its pivotal role in the informalist revolution. In a letter dated 28 April 1958, Cirlot wrote to Millares that informalism is not a sect, but it is a manner that entails certain essential affinities. He is referring to such as the intrinsic characteristics of El Paso, including its fondness for Hispanic tradition and a certain critical patriotism that did not initially pose a challenge to the Francoist regime. El Paso was quite the role model for the artists of the ensuing decades, despite its clear predilection for informalist approaches.

Despite the fleeting existence of El Paso’s activities —we are talking about a period that spanned from the first Manifesto, signed in February 1957, to May 1960, when Carta de El Paso number 16, entitled Última comunicación, written by Antonio Saura, was published, in which the group was disbanded— the activism of its members gave everyone a role and lent their subsequent careers an international scope. Their works were intended to show that, through a collective effort, it was possible to invigorate the creativity numbed by the prevailing dictatorship. It was a movement marked by frenzied activity during that short period. A group of artists united in a shared effort, who marched together through those years, fighting with a common, but plural, militancy: informalism. To help the visitor understand the setting in which this movement arose, it is important to put Spain during those years into context. The country in which this group of young artists developed had emerged from a civil war, followed by a long, arduous post-war period, enduring almost complete international isolation.