Together with other Galicia-born painters from his generation, like Manuel Colmeiro (1901-1999), Laxeiro is one of those exponents of the avant-gardes of the 1930s who never forgot their popular roots.

Laxeiro began his training in Havana, where he had emigrated with his parents as a teenager. He was interested in Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945) and Jesús Rodríguez Corredoyra (1889-1939), whose works were exhibited in Cuba when Laxeiro was still living there. Back in Spain, he continued his studies in Madrid, opting for more traditional painting, connected to the land and to his native rural environment.

His watercolours, oil paintings and prints captured a volumetric figuration with a profound inner power. However, after the Spanish Civil War, his painting hardened, eschewing Naturalism and deriving towards a descriptive Expressionism. Together with Manuel Colmeiro (1901-1999), Luis Seoane (1910-1979) and Carlos Maside (1897-1958) he created the artists group called los renovadores del arte gallego (innovators of Galician art), whose ambition was to find a common path between tradition and modernism.

Composición is a work of great visual impact. Its structure brings to mind a medieval altarpiece with the arrangement of the scenes in different compartments with the weight of the composition falling on the only circular form in the ensemble. It could also conjure up a stained glass window in the black contours isolating each scene.

The piece is sustained on a considerable narrative expressionism accentuated by the use of a palette of earthy, brownish-grey and reddish tones common in Laxeiro’s work. The patent lack of definition of the piece makes it hard to determine its “iconographic programme” although we can appreciate figures reminiscent of Picasso, outlined with strong, voluminous lines.