The expressive power of the Venezuelan-born Galician artist is evident in this painting, whose title alludes to the connection between the East and the West, that geographic or mental gateway where the two meet and their cultures and aesthetics merge, a gateway to a different world, to new enriching experiences for the individual.

Darío Álvarez Basso’s trajectory is built on his countless travels around the world: a vehicle for experimentation and a way of getting in touch with highly diverse styles and influences that made him such a curious artist, interested in everything and immersed in an ongoing evolutionary process.

His career as an artist started to take off in the mid 1980s. Beginning with a non-objective, gestural and matter-based style indebted to and his admiration for Tàpies’ way of working (1923-2012) as well as to some of the practitioners from the , in the 1990s he started to add figurative elements into his works.

He created this Porta de Oriente in between periods spent in Pissignano (Italy) and in New York. It is close in style to the body of work he created in Italy: a mass of pure colour in which the matter is pierced by what he calls “ulcers”.

The structure of the work is geometric, circular and radial. He uses red as a solar symbol, and the densely applied matter seems to emerge from the holes perforating the canvas, as if in a strange volcanic eruption, creating a surface that invites us to touch it. Construction and sensation merge in this artist’s creative process, examining his own identity as a man and as an artist.