In this work, the tranquillity associated with teatime is charged with tension by the presence of a red background, like bloodstains, and the name of a Nazi concentration camp, Dachau.
Xesus Vázquez started his career in an abstract mode. It was in the mid-eighties that his work veered towards a figurative style, and in 1989, when, in a period of relative world peace, what was to become the First Gulf War began to take shape, he began his series Batallas, to which Dachau belongs. For the artist it was “like a kind of litany to refer to absolute evil as a memory trace”.
In this work the evil memory reminds him of the catastrophes of the Second World War and the Nazi concentration camps. Dachau, near the town of the same name north of Munich, in Bavaria, was one of many.
The context of his works refers to non-concrete spaces which surround the composition. A background of red patches with the word “Dachau” at the top, written backwards in type that looks pixellated, as if it was done by computer, a common feature of works in this series. The same is true of the use of invented symbols, in this case a kind of blue braid rising up the picture.
The centre is occupied by a tray with several teapots, reduced to mere white lines and constructed in the void. To the artist, this intimist, familiar scene, which clashes head-on with the reality of the concentration camps, is a representation of what he calls a “deceptive absolute good, because it is precisely at home that the system of taboos and radical repression is established, from childhood, and we are taught laws and rules which will allow us to be social beings”.