Ortiz de Elgea has a major place in the Basque art scene. His practice has always been grounded in landscape, constantly evolving ever since his very beginnings and straddling abstraction and figuration.

This work evinces the shift his practice underwent in the early seventies when the figure, at the very core of his immediately previous phase, gradually vanishes away and cedes the main role to the language of painting itself: the interaction of colours, the organisation of the forms and their compositional interrelations. This change was to receive widespread acclaim in 1975, when the artist presented his second exhibition at Galería Kreisler Dos in Madrid.

In this particular oil on canvas painting we can readily observe how the bold colours, which first made an appearance in his work in the sixties under the influence of and which featured strongly in his prior output, are gradually becoming less prominent; now they are replaced by darker, more earthy tones that speak to landscape: “nature is always teaching me to paint”, as the artist once claimed.

The composition is arranged into large masses that subdivide the painting, in certain areas almost appearing like intricate mazes; however, it does not fall victim to horror vacui thanks to the contention in the other parts of the work. In this way Ortiz de Elgea creates his own painterly geography, lending all the emphasis of the painting to the colour, form and composition.