Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés, Juan Antonio Toledo. Equipo Crónica

Equipo Crónica was a key group in the critical figurative movement in Spain during the second half of the 20th century. Emerging in Valencia in the mid-1960s, their work was a reaction against the dominant informalist painting, proposing a radical recovery of the figurative image from a critical, political, and ironic perspective.

The collective was initially formed by Rafael Solbes (1940–1981), Manuel Valdés (Valencia, 1942), and Juan Antonio Toledo (Valencia, 1940–1995). After their first exhibitions in 1965, Toledo left the group, although he maintained conceptual affinities with its approach. From then on, the core group consisted of Solbes and Valdés, whose collaboration defined the project's most recognizable identity.

Equipo Crónica's work revolves around the appropriation of images from the media and art history, reorganized through a refined visual language of flat colors and serial compositions. Their strategy consisted of shifting from individual authorship to a collective construction of the image, in which irony and cultural critique played a central role. In this sense, their work is situated within the international debate between Pop Art and critical realism of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Throughout their career, they developed a series of works that function as visual essays on the history of painting, politics, and mass culture. From their initial period (1964–1966), which incorporated media iconography, to later works such as *La recuperación* (1967–1969), revisiting the painting of the Spanish Golden Age, or *Guernica 69*, in direct dialogue with Pablo Picasso, their production constructs a critical archive of reinterpreted historical images.

In the 1970s, the group intensified its political and narrative focus with series such as Police and Culture (1971), Black Series (1972), and The Firing Squad (1975–1976), where violence, repression, and the signs of the postwar period became central themes. Simultaneously, they explored the very nature of the artistic profession in series like Trades and Tradespeople and The Subversion of Signs, where painting became an object of analysis and deconstruction.

During the second half of the decade, their interest in the structure of the image was articulated in works such as The Billiards Game and The Plot, while in Urban Landscapes (1978–1979) and The Journeys (1980) they introduced a more sociological perspective on the contemporary city. The cycle concludes with The Public and the Private (1981), where references to Rembrandt and Géricault acquire a dimension of political reinterpretation of art history.

The Equipo Crónica project was extensively curated and studied in institutional contexts, such as the exhibition structured by Tomás Llorens, which organized their work into sixteen series, highlighting the group's conceptual coherence. Their legacy stands as one of the most significant contributions to visual criticism in contemporary Spain, having transformed painting into a tool for the ideological interpretation of images.