This painting is an excellent example of the legacy of this artist, who was endowed with a great capacity for ingenuity and experimentation.

Although he was born in Madrid, he established his roots in Oviedo, the native city of his father, Joaquín Vaquero Palacios (1900-1998), who was also an artist and from whom he acquired his taste for painting. He travelled with his family on many occasions, but the decisive experience was his visit to Rome in 1950, where he studied architecture and experimented with artistic techniques such as fresco painting, stained glass and mosaics.

His creative urge made him a highly versatile artist. He not only specialised in painting, but was also an outstanding printmaker, sculptor and architect, amalgamating the last two disciplines with the aid of materials such as concrete, steel and stone.

As he himself put it, his creative work was “a process of successive approaches to a basic image”, which explains why his work, in general terms, maintains a overriding unity based on a dialogue between informalismo and narrative figurativism.

Arab Village may have been inspired by a journey he made with his father along the Mediterranean coast in 1956. In this picture one perceives a certain post-Cubist influence which recalls Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969), the master who exerted such an influence on his father’s work. Here the artist achieves an ascetic control of the landscape, representing a village by superimposing white and earth-coloured houses leading up to the two towers which stand out in the background. He applies the paint lavishly with the help of a spatula, enabling him to create large volumes which endow the work as a whole with textures of very different material thickness, scattered randomly over the panel.