The artist · Guadix, Spain
Spanish painter, founder of Hyperimpressionism.
Four decades painting with industrial enamel on aluminium.
About the artist
A Spanish painter, born in Málaga and based in Guadix (Granada), Sócrates Rízquez has spent more than four decades developing a pictorial language entirely his own — one that has crystallised into Hyperimpressionism: a style born of practice, of accumulated experience, and of the need to give a name to something that had long existed in his work before it had one.
The visual seed began to germinate in adolescence, through an experience as simple as it was decisive: early access to a large collection of travel agency catalogues. Those brochures, printed on glossy paper with their characteristic sheen and heightened colours, were not consumer tools to him — they were visual portals. He learned to perceive a scene as an emotional whole, to see the relationship between light and architecture, between colour and space, between human scale and monumentality. Without knowing it, he was training his eye.
"Hyperimpressionism was not born as theory. It was born as experience. As a way of seeing that took decades to find its name."
In his youth, during the 1980s, he painted with whatever was to hand. The domestic enamel left over from some household job was his first serious plastic medium, long before he had any conscious awareness of it. The decisive moment came in 1986, during his Military Service, when he was assigned to paint a mural using industrial brushes and basic enamel on a raw chipboard panel. From that forced experience came an intimate familiarity with enamel: the challenge of taming the untameable became, from that point on, a lifelong pursuit.
From that day, with rare exceptions, synthetic enamel has been his medium of artistic expression. And forty years on from that military mural, he is still learning from it. The book Here and Now… Hyperimpressionism, written by Sócrates himself, is currently being drafted. It will bring together, for the first time in a structured form, the foundations, technique and manifesto of this artistic style — one that aspires to become a shared language.
Influences
Artists who planted something that, many years later, would take a different path:
Style composition
The approximate proportion of its roots:
Mural preparation · Guadix, 2024
The technique
There are materials one uses, and materials that choose you. Synthetic enamel, in the case of Sócrates, was the latter. He did not come to it through theoretical reasoning or academic recommendation, but through necessity, economy and circumstance. And when he began to understand what that material was capable of, something shifted in the way he conceived painting.
Synthetic enamel is based on alkyd resins dissolved in organic solvents. Pigments — titanium for whites, iron oxides for ochres, phthalocyanines for blues and greens — are dispersed in that base, creating a high pigment-density paint with properties that set it radically apart from the traditional media of the fine arts.
When dry, enamel forms a smooth, reflective film that needs no subsequent varnish and maintains its intensity indefinitely. The work does not reflect light: it generates it from within.
A single coat can completely cover what lies beneath, with a chromatic density hard to match in oil or acrylic. The colour becomes solid, vivid, irreducible.
Enamel was conceived to bond with metal, making it the natural partner of aluminium as a support. The symbiosis between both materials is the technical core of Hyperimpressionism.
The drying process — through solvent evaporation followed by an oxidative reaction — is significantly faster than oil. This imposes a demanding working rhythm that leaves no room for second thoughts.
Against wear, water, UV rays and the passage of time, with a durability that far exceeds most conventional artistic media. A work made for generations.
The shift from wood to aluminium composite panel was a decisive turning point. This support offers perfect dimensional stability, lightness, total moisture resistance and a surface that enhances the luminosity of the enamel.
In the studio
Sócrates's workshop is not a place of production but of thought. A space where the vaguest idea can become a painting, and where the most advanced painting can become a question again. The sketchbooks are full of scribbles, loose phrases, tested framings, colours noted in words when there was no other way to hold onto them.
The process always begins before the brush: in the study of a photograph someone took in New York, in a cut of light on a facade that caught no one else's attention, in the intuition that this moment — this instant between the rain and the wet asphalt — contains something worth painting. And then, the enamel. Direct, demanding, with no possibility of retreat. Every stroke, a decision.
What accumulates over the years is not only technique: it is awareness. The capacity to recognise when a stroke is being too cautious and needs to let go, and when the emotion is taking too much command and the cold eye needs to reassert itself. That alternation between surrender and distance produces the best paintings.
Career
Every painting by Sócrates is unique and unrepeatable. If a work stops you, the artist replies personally. No intermediaries.