Palencia was always closely involved with the avant-garde movements of his time and experimented with various forms of expression until achieving his own personal language.

On arriving in Paris, he engaged in a cubist practice which he would soon leave behind in lieu of lyrical figuration, of which this piece from 1930 is an excellent example, a style he took up in the company of Pancho Cossío (1898-1970) and Francisco Bores (1898-1972).

Together with Alberto Sánchez (1895-1962) he went on to found the

 School of Vallecas 

(1927-1936) founded in 1927 by Benjamín Palencia and Alberto Sánchez with the purpose of renewing Spanish art in line with what was happening elsewhere in Europe. Landscape became the main subject matter of this school, albeit a highly sober landscape influenced by Hispanic primitivism, fauvist colour, a surrealist approach and cubist order. The starting point was the arid, barren land on the outskirts of Madrid in the direction of Toledo, stripped of any superfluous object and worked with economic brushwork and a palette of earthy tones. This take on landscape straddled tradition and modernism. The School of Vallecas disbanded with the outbreak of the Civil War, although it was the only school to rise from its ashes, reborn in the Second School of Vallecas (1939-1942).

, defined by a predilection for sober forms and earthy tones, that strove to renew Spanish art by shedding the influence of the Paris-based avant-gardes.

With pared-down brushwork and doing away with any superfluous object, Palencia gave free rein to colour, always bright although within a palette of clays and earthy tones. His is an art defined by tradition but without renouncing modernism.

In this small-format piece Palencia recreates an intimate world, close at hand. He represents a bowl of fruit by combining areas of colour and spontaneous curvilinear drawing. Contravening the norm, he first of all arranges the areas of colour that give the fruit their tone. Then he draws the silhouettes of the fruit and of the fruit bowl over those areas using concentric ovals and curved lines that are anything but improvised. The technique is tremendously effective for the vibration it achieves, instilling life into the composition.

To complete the scene, he uses pen and ink to define the bunch of grapes, the stem and leaves of the fruit. Meanwhile, he adds a horizontal line to lend depth to the work, creating the table and the striped background the fruit bowl is set against.