In a very personal style, far removed from the modes of painting of his contemporaries, Juan Fernández Lacomba depicts a bleak, desolate landscape which may remind us of the surrealist spaces of Yves Tanguy (1900-1955): profound, diffuse landscapes in which the horizon is so indistinct that one cannot really tell where the earth ends and the sky begins.

Lacomba started out in a figurative expressionist idiom which gradually softened and concentrated on representing landscape. He developed this taste for landscape in Paris, where he moved in the early eighties with a scholarship from the French government.

In the mid-eighties he set up his studio in Carmona, in the province of Seville. At that time the central focus of his art was abstract landscapes, with a sensual and expressive visual appeal, always closely related to memory and dreams.

In 1990 he exhibited his series Fuegos, which includes Llama azul. These works involve an ambiguous dialogue between the mythical associations and the everyday nature of fire. An open space, full of greys and violets, draws the viewer in. The vertical blue flame, which gives its name to work, emanating from a solitary branch, is the central element of the composition. It is a cold, nebulous scene in which the colour temperature is balanced with small red patches scattered over the picture like sparks.

It is a land of memory in which the earth is presented as ethereal and weightless, reduced to a mere space on which the branch is resting.