The eclectic artist Carlos Alcolea came to painting from an intellectual rather a technical background. Without abandoning the figurative, his work evolved from the early influence of Luis Gordillo (1934), with a predominant taste for narrating concepts, towards compositions full of great symbolic and ironic power.

Alcolea was meticulous and highly conscientious, and in this picture from 1990 he uses geometry and flat colours as organising elements. The forms and figures are constructed by the use of line. Highly chromatic colour — taken from British Pop artists such as David Hockney (1937), of whom Alcolea declared himself a follower — acquires great importance, as it is used to construct a space which is complex, ambiguous and somewhat disquieting.

As in La ciega veneciana (1984), the characters depicted are completely timeless and deformed, occupying a world which the painter has created specifically for them.