This is a work of high artistic quality by an artist who uses a highly personal painterly idiom, full of very recognisable references, to reflect on the world around us.

He is a masterly inventor of buildings and architectural spaces, whose paintings are characterised by refined technique and by transmitting a certain feeling of unease which invites the viewer to meditate on them.

Ángel Orcajo, who started from an almost magical realism, belongs to that generation of painters who responded to the crisis of informalismo by opting for a figurative alternative generally inspired by British . The urban landscape becomes the thematic basis of his work: big cities, which take on a bleak, disturbing atmosphere in his pictures. It is a space with a certain metaphysical character in which geometry and unease are superbly administered.

In the eighties, Orcajo’s chromatically intense and spatially complex compositions — an explosion of forms and colours — became more markedly and obviously dynamic. The presence of skyscrapers, an ostentatiously deployed symbol of rationality, does not express an idealisation of this form of architecture but rather the inability of the individual to escape technological functionalism and the progressive dehumanisation of society.

In 1985 Orcajo arranged and designed the space for the Laberintos urbanos exhibition, a multicultural event in which his work was displayed alongside videos and photomontages by the video-artist Domingo Sarrey (1948), and which also included concerts by Jesús Villa Rojo with LIM (Laboratorio de Interpretación Musical) and Suso Sainz with Orquesta de las Nubes. The artist takes part regularly in this kind of mixed cultural events. For instance, in the survey show held at MEAC (Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo) five years earlier he had presented his work with a jazz concert with the musician Manolo Gas. A year after being held at MEAC, Laberintos urbanos toured to the USA. In this show Orcajo explores ideas on the urban space, a place of manifold reflections and visions, giving rise to the creation of a whole plastic universe, exemplified in this work Arquitecturas and also in his later output, for instance Escenario último, another work in the BBVA Collection.