Without needing to show any human figures hard at their labours, or the crashing waves of a violent storm at sea, this seascape of the port of La Guardia relies on pictorial technique alone to symbolize the harsh life of seafaring men, who brave the most dangerous conditions in their search for the catch.
In its apparent simplicity, this painting is an unusual case. Exceptional for its extreme lyricism but, at the same time, balanced. All of its pictorial elements are infused with spirituality; there are scarcely two square centimetres of uniform colour. All is vibrating, palpitating, with the soul transmitted by the craft of the pictorial process; nothing remains inert, impermeable to this imbued spirit... But this subjectivism, taken to an extreme in extracting from the medium (gouache) all of its expressive possibilities, is not drowned in mere formalism; it serves, rather, the objective communication of spiritual realities, so mysterious and ineffable to human beings; it reaches deep within that which “modern art”, to a great extent, has forgotten, and this is the spiritual dimension of man. “The arts of the 20th and early 21st centuries have stopped viewing man as a being with a spiritual dimension, and have thus transformed him into a simple visual object” (José Jiménez Lozano, winner of the 2002 Cervantes Prize).