In this painting, the aesthetic and visual qualities prevail over the narrative intention.

Juan Barjola’s subject matters tend to be tragic, revealing the harshest and most painful face of reality. Notwithstanding, in the early 1970s his painting softened, with the artist abandoning his unadulterated expressionism in favour of a new more abstract language in which the visual values are permeated by narrative ones.

Any connection with reality vanishes; the figures are reduced to superimposed, intertwining surfaces coloured with flat dyes, in this specific case depicting what seems to be a carpenter working with a wood-cutting machine. The colour is as intense and flat as in a silk-screen print. To create a sense of volume, Barjola does not use the degradations he employed in later phases.

Here, the plasticity of the forms triumphs over the meaning, and even the arms of the “man” have the grain of wood. The curved forms, recurrent in Barjola’s practice throughout his whole career, also gain greater force.