A beacon for contemporary art in Spain, in the 1980s Luis Gordillo’s practice had already hit its stride in terms of iconography and painting. Patent in his work is an early influence of Surrealism and psychoanalysis (which he underwent in various periods of his life), of the irony of artists such as Francis Picabia (1879-1953), and of . His creative world could not be understood without the inclusion of elements related with mass culture (albeit with highly personal nuances) and biological and technological motifs.

The decade of the 1970s is especially critical for the formation of Gordillo’s iconography. At that time, a personal crisis led him to automatic drawing, consisting in making mechanical, uncontrolled marks on the paper while performing some other task, for instance, talking on the phone. These “telephone drawings” as he called them were later introduced in his paintings, which he presented to the public in an exhibition held in 1971 which had a great impact on the movement from Madrid. This way of drawing exerted an influence on the creative process of his works, starting with a free, disorganised expression that was then transferred to the canvas through successive layers he painted in usually flat colours.

One can still detect the use of automatism in this work, coexisting alongside organic forms, those meandering structures that populate Gordillo’s painterly universe. The horror vacui so common in other compositions is absent here. A blank, almost empty space occupies the central canvas of this triptych, emphasising the notion of fluidity of thought suggested by the liquid brain of the title —the formlessness of a liquid element that expands to take on corporeity in the solid character of the end canvas.

The cold palette, consisting of Gordillo’s signature blues, greens and pinks, is beginning to give way to the greys that little by little ended up taking over his paintings.