Xavier Grau trained as an artist in Barcelona. In 1976 he took part in the exhibition Por una crítica de la pintura  held in his home town, where the Trama group presented its magazine with the support of Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012). That event marked his ascription to this multidisciplinary group, originally made up by José Manuel Broto (1949), Gonzalo Tena (1950) and Javier Rubio (1952), all of them related to the French movement.

Influenced by American abstraction, in spite of the apparent spontaneity in the creation of his composition and in the use of gesture and colour, everything responds to a thoroughly meditated plan. Grau builds on the canvas applying colour marks and planes, thus creating a surface revealing evident layering.

The work O Ferran o García o Sevilla  pays tribute to the Mallorcan painter Ferrán García Sevilla, with whom, in the 1980s, Grau shared a taste for freeing the act of painting from conceptual restraints. In this work Grau created fields of colour through the accumulation of marks, resulting in a baroque and highly expressive effect. The piece is in turn an enigmatic work, in whose centre Grau has placed what could be a Venetian mask, perhaps alluding to one García Sevilla painted in his work Adán y Eva  from 1980.