A key exponent of Basque Realism, Lazkano’s work is arresting for the technical virtuosity and the evocative atmosphere his paintings convey. He contends that his art is “not an end in itself, but a means of understanding the world in a new way”. His distinctive contribution is a vision that can be defined as objective without being merely imitative: “My aim is to create a tension between the sign and its referent, to create a field of openness based on the ambiguity between represented space and real space.”

The theme of architecture as a space created by man was to be a constant element in his work, and his theoretical reflections on it became the core of his painting. Lazkano first came to public attention at the Muestra de Arte Joven in 1986, with a painting depicting a number of urban and architectural features. From that moment onwards he continued focusing on urban and industrial landscapes, but choosing places falling into decay and dereliction, depicting them in terms reminiscent of nineteenth-century Romantic painting.

The imprint left by the various cities he travelled to is significant in his production. Worth highlighting is the case of New York, which Lazkano visited in 1989-1990 and which he defined as a “city outside time, without people, devastated, remote, like a document of what it once was.” This impression was the starting point for his series Two Cities as One, to which this painting—a magnificent example of his New York phase—belongs.

This work depicts a panoramic view over the East River showing the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, a view that always fascinated him and which he repeated in several of his pieces. However, the artist does not work from life, nor from modern photographs, but from the work of two great American photographers of the thirties. He acknowledges his debt to the photos published in the books Changing New York (1939), by Berenice Abbott, and Cast-Iron Architecture in New York: A Photographic Survey (1974), on which he based this enigmatic view. The fact is that he instils his scenarios with a mysterious character that is further intensified by the total absence of human presence and the inclusion of an imposing zinc frame made by the artist himself. Lazkano began to incorporate monumental framings as part of his painterly landscapes after his sojourn in the Big Apple, transforming them into a key and inseparable feature of the work itself. In them he inserts small visual and graphic elements that round off the composition, thus turning these works into true modern altarpieces.