Luzuriaga is widely considered one of the most important exponents of the so-called Basque School of the post-war period. As exemplified in this particular work, one of the primary motifs depicted by the artist throughout his career was the estuary of Bilbao, an endless source of inspiration for his iconography. The artist became so familiarised with its countless enclaves that on many occasions he painted it from memory, recreating it to the point of turning it into an archetype. It is worth underscoring that the estuary was a considerable source of wealth and prosperity for Bilbao and it played a key role in the development of the city, making it essential for any proper understanding of modernism in the Basque Country, highly dependent on the industrialization of the region ever since the early twentieth century.

This oil-on-canvas painting is from Luzuriaga’s phase prior to the eighties, characterized by a predominance of drawing and the construction of very simple elements, highly influenced by the neocubism of Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969). Without overlooking a more formal grounding, he tends to structure reality in planes, using a technique based on glazes and swathes of colour. In this way he manages to render an atmosphere dominated by the grey tones proper to an industrial scene, although here imbued with a more pleasing and delicate character thanks to the effects of light reflected in the water, a recourse that adds great plasticity. Compositionally speaking, worth underscoring is the artist’s interest in arranging the image in different planes through an intense use of black in the elements located in the foreground, contrasting with soft transparencies, which is then gradually toned down to create a sense of depth.

Rather than underlining the industrial aspect of the place, Luzuriaga depicted it with a notable poetic tone. He manages to humanize the scene by creating a subtle atmosphere through the use of soft grey, ochre and mauve glazes, which, when taken together with the study of light, create a very nuanced chromatic range. One can only note the presence of an industrial aesthetic in the smoking chimneys of the factories, which one can intuit in the background, rendered with incredible subtlety in very nebulous tonalities. Thanks to the linear character, which counters the solidity inherent to an industrial landscape, the forms seems to almost float. This image is more evocative than a scene taken directly from nature, with the aim of transmitting a sense of peace and calm as opposed to the frenetic pace of the surroundings. This stillness, reminiscent at times of an oriental aesthetic, responds to Luzuriaga’s interest in interpreting reality from a dreamlike optic, in order to create a pure and silent painting, removed from the anecdotal.