He worked to pay for his studies at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, graduating in composition in 1936. With the Gratacels he participated in the 1st Salon d’IndeFendents, held in Barcelona in 1936.

He began to reap success with his painting a couple of months before the start of the Spanish Civil War. Because he fought against the rebellion led by Francisco Franco against the established government of the Second Spanish Republic, at the end of the war he had to go into exile to France, where he in turn is persecuted and imprisoned by the Gestapo during the German occupation.

After his escape, he arrived in Paris, where he decided to settle to paint, in 1944. First he settled at number 27 and then at 29 rue Guénégaud, near Pont Neuf and rue de Seine, near Saint Germain des Prés.

Riba Rovira also liked jazz and going to the Bar Vert in Paris.

He accidentally meets Gertrude Stein when she was walking with her dog “Canasta” along the quays of the Seine. She was enthusiastic about him, and presented her first postwar exhibition at the Roquépine Gallery, Paris, in 1945. The following is a translation of Stein’s foreword to Francisco Riba-Rovira’s exhibition at Roquepine Gallery in May 1945:

It is inevitable that when we really need someone we will find them. The person you need attracts you like a magnet. I returned to Paris after several long years spent in the countryside and I needed a young painter, a young painter to wake me up. Paris was magnificent, but where was the young painter? I looked everywhere: at my contemporaries, his followers. I walked a lot, I looked everywhere, in all the galleries, but the young painter was not there. Yes, I walk a lot, a lot along the banks of the Seine, where we fish, paint, walk our dogs (I’m one of those who walks his dogs). He is not just a young painter! One day, on the corner of a street, in one of these little streets in my neighborhood, I saw a man painting. I looked at him, at him and at his painting, since I always want everyone to believe that I have an indefatigable curiosity to search, and I was moved. Yes, a young painter! We began to speak, because we speak easily, as easily as on rural roads, in the small streets of the neighborhood. His story was the sad story of the youth of our time. A young Spanish man who studied Fine Arts in Barcelona, ​​the civil war, exile, a concentration camp, escape, Gestapo, another prison, another escape … Eight years wasted! If they have been lost, who knows? And now a little misery, but still, the paint. Why does it seem to me that he was the young painter? Why? I visited his drawings, his paintings and we talked. I explained to him that for me, all modern painting is based on what Cézanne had failed to do, when he could not do something he pushed it away. He has insisted on proving his incapacity; it has exposed his lack of success, and showing what he couldn’t do turned out to be an obsession. The artists influenced by him were equally obsessed with the things they couldn’t get and started the cloaking system. It was natural and even inevitable to do so, and this soon became an art: Matisse has camouflaged and insisted at the same time what Cézanne could not do, and Picasso has camouflaged, played and tormented all these things … “. The only one who wanted to insist on Cézanne’s big problem was Juan Gris, but it was too hard a task for him and he died doing it. And now, here I find a young painter who doesn’t follow the tendency to play with what Cézanne couldn’t do But it directly attacks the things he had tried to do:

create objects that should exist by themselves and not in relation to others. That is why I am fascinated. This young man has skill and strength. ” His strength will propel you on this path. He fascinates me and that is why he is the young painter that I needed. He is Francisco Riba-Rovira.

Gertrude Stein À la recherche d’un jeune peintre (1945), from Fontaine magazine, Director Max-Pol, nº42, pages 287-288.

Gertrude Stein also introduced him to Picasso and introduced him to his circle of friends. Due to their relationship, Riba-Rovira made a portrait of Gertrude Stein that appears in the catalog, with a foreword by Gertrude Stein, for the Roquepine Gallerie exhibition in 1945.