At the time when this painting was created, beaches were a recurrent subject matter in Pacheco’s work. First were the beaches from Galicia or the beach in San Sebastian, and later, in the 1990s, he found his inspiration in Lisbon.

Pacheco’s paintings are the result of a reworking of quick sketches whose framing is reminiscent of photography, a discipline he also cultivates. Thematically speaking, women and beaches always seem to go hand in hand in his work.

The spaces where his scenes and their stories are played out are underpinned by an unsettling stillness, an expectant silence very much redolent of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). What might be a view he happened upon by chance becomes a representation of a substantiated myth, Venus, emerging from the water against the light. An anonymous everywoman with a face of imprecise features, in some ways connected to the portraits painted by Francis Bacon (1909-1992), a painter he venerated.

In this work, his signature play of shadows and reflections is produced in a natural environment and not in the coldness of a glass, as in Ventana de tren, a work from the same year also in the BBVA Collection.