In 1987, at a time when he was better known in the USA than in Spain, Mariano de Blas, a painter with great personality and creative fantasy, held an exhibition at Galería Kreisler in Madrid and took part at the Fifth Caja Postal Competition, and it is believed that this work was included in that latter event.
 
The strength and colouring of this composition are particularly evident. The bright pure colours are layered over a ground constructed from a range of greys, a vehicle and support to deploy an array of graphic symbols that trap the beholder’s attention. But the arrangement of these elements is by no means random, rather it responds directly to the artist’s will, who ordered these structures geometrically in search of a sense of unity. The red and yellow brushstrokes break the harmony of the grey background and enrich the composition as a whole.
 
By means of layers and substrata he seeks to provide an order, as if his reference were a street wall peopled with graffiti; the very same wall that Tàpies had been using for his works since the mid-fifties, the walls on which he had layered a palette of brown and ochre over a grey ground.
 
De Blas’s work is characterised by countless superimpositions of lines, sets of stripes, signs and plays of colours that create a kind of strange labyrinth, a panorama rich in nuances. For the painter, life is precisely that: a strange labyrinth, dark and unsettling, but where there is always a message, something to say and to express. The horror vacui of his compositions enables him to give free rein to his complex allegories and an interesting mesh of dreamlike language.