Although the two paintings by this artist in the BBVA Collection were made in the early 1990s, their respective aesthetic languages are quite disparate. In this piece, the material is the force introducing and emphasising the movement so patent in the work. We are trapped and drawn in by the image as if it were a magnet, conveying the feeling of vertigo, of a maelstrom, of inescapable fate against which we cannot fight.

Álvarez Basso painted Heliogabalus y el mar the year he walked the Camino de Santiago, an experience which for some is a journey into their innermost selves, while for others it is a rite of initiation. It makes us think of the grooves in ploughed arid land, but also of the vertebrae of a spine, a resemblance that reminds us of structures used by the artist beforehand. Álvarez Basso defines his work from that year as a fusion of the ideas of man as an individual and as a social and cultural entity within his own history.

The title of the work is an explicit reference to Heliogabalus, a Roman emperor from the 3rd century B.C. known for his eccentricity and fanaticism. He died at the hands of his own praetorian guard who, after quartering Heliogabalus, threw him into the Tiber, which carried his body to the sea. The restrained, matter-based grooves might represent the whirlpool made by his body as it was swallowed up by the sea.