The sea features strongly in many of Vázquez’s works, occupying the whole focus and leaving room for nothing else. There is no sky or earth, only the rough and nervous water relentlessly creating dark, fearsome and mysterious whirlpools.

Starting out from an abstract style, in the mid 1980s his practice underwent a change that brought it closer to figuration. The work at hand was made precisely in the midst of this transition towards the figurative and metaphorical spaces he would later favour.

Vázquez uses purely painterly means to create the choppy water, employing thick impasto and long and energetically intertwined brushstrokes executed in a palette limited to black and white or blue and white.

A poetry lover, his works have a strong underlying lyrical tone. In them Vázquez establishes a relationship between the art of literature and the art of painting. This work is inspired by the description of a whirlpool made by Edgar Allan Poe in A Descent into the Maelström, “Here the vast bed of the waters […] burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion.” For Poe, that is the fate of any water silently imbued by shadow and suffering, like a mirror of death itself.

The whirlpool is displaced towards one of the sides of the composition. With a frightening appearance, its darkness emphasises the sublime feeling of horror and at the same makes it more alluring. It may even remind us of the night storms by Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851). The beholders are faced with a threatening nature that induces them to reflect on the human being before his fate and his own nature. Vázquez does not care much for landscape as such, but rather about those places that entail a superhuman challenge, forcing the individual to face up to survival; a dangerous beauty that leaves no one unmoved.