Chirino played a prominent role in the renewal of the visual arts in Spain in the period following the Civil War. As a member of the El Paso group (1958) he coincided with the emergence of a vernacular with strong Spanish roots and a critical stance towards the country’s political and social situation at the time.

The most recurrent element in Chirino’s work is the spiral which, together with concentric circles and symmetric stripes, are representations used in the artistic expressions of many civilisations. But spirals are also present in many of Nature’s elements and occurrences, like in the power of the sea or of the wind, as well as in the symbolic world of anthropological and ethnographic references of the native Guanche people from the Canaries and the cultures of nearby Africa, two traditions that were to play a key role in the artist’s practice.

A spiral points both to the beginning and to the end, to nothingness, to vertigo, to anxiety. It is like a germinal nucleus that expands and builds a reality; a spiral that, in this case, is off-centred and suggests the mask from the past he would undertake in this Afrocan series.

Made in 1973, this work foreshadows the composition and development of the Afrocan series Chirino would work on from 1975 onwards, particularly the earliest works in this suite from before 1977.