He studied Violin at the Conservatory in Madrid, where he got in touch with intellectuals that introduced him in the surrealist movement. He also combined his studies with painting and his first literary essays. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Republican side and then he travelled to France into exile. Afterwards, he lived in several Latin American countries (Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Puerto Rico) until he definitively established himself in the USA. He took a doctor's degree in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, presenting his doctoral thesis on the Guernica by Picasso. He worked as a teacher for some years in several centres.
In the Dominican Republic, he collaborated in the newspapers La Nación and Democracia between 1941 and 1947 and some years later he worked in the newspaper España Libre in New York. His first work Arte y artistas en Guatemala was published in 1949 and two years later, in 1951, he published Isla cofre mítico in Puerto Rico. He also wrote he novels La novela del indio Tupinamba (Mexico, 1959) and Lo que sucedió (Mexico, 1968), the short novel El Clavo (Madrid, 1967) and the storybook Federica no era tonta y otros cuentos (Mexico, 1970). After joining the surrealist movement in 1942, he participated in international exhibitions from 1947 onwards together with important artists such as Breton, Miró, Prabia, Man Ray, Erns, etc. He also made individual exhibitions in many European and American cities. These are some of his most important pictures: Páxaro-flor (1945); O vóo nocturno do páxaro (1952); O cabaliño da raíña africana (1963), Volcán de agua (1964); O soño xeroglífico de Carapuchiña vermella (1990) and Elexía por Andrés Nin (1991).
In 1995, he opened his foundation in Santiago de Compostela, where we can see an important part of his work.