The goal of the exhibition Latent Modernity. Avant-garde and Innovative Painters in Spanish Figurative Art (1920-1970) presented at Carmen Thyssen Málaga Museum is to take a closer look at a highly influential period in twentieth-century art history in Spain. Taking as its point of departure, the show then traces the path that led to the various different neo-figurative tendencies in the 1950s and 60s.

The BBVA Collection is contributing to this exhibition with the work Window over Portugal (ca. 1922-23), by Daniel Vázquez Díaz, a painter whose personal reinterpretation of laid the foundations for a renewal of the visual arts in Spain and made him a notable pioneer in the country’s avant-garde. Thanks to his influence, many artists in Spain at the time gave shape to a new language that combined tradition and modernism, developing a style that some critics have called “geometric-constructive figuration”.

This oil-on-canvas work is from a series called Windows of Portugal, which includes a number of very similar versions; in it, through the window behind the fish bowl in the foreground one can make out a horizon with buildings whose two-dimensional outlines, transformed here into planes of synthetic colour, are rendered directly as part of the landscape. Worth underscoring is the inclusion of the window, a recurring feature in Vázquez Díaz’s output, sometimes as the point around which the composition revolves and other times as a backdrop used to achieve a sense of depth and introduce a contrast of light.