In this picture, painted from an expressionist perspective, the artist gives free rein to the techniques of

 Surrealist Automatism 

based on the representation of the “non rational” and on the prevalence of the unconscious. For the artist, the past, present and future all share the same timeline, whose duration is an infinite instant rendered in an impromptu and automatic manner.

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Claramunt, who was self-taught as an artist, was an active member of his generation, but stood apart from the experimental initiatives being developed around him at that time. Rather than seeking references in his surroundings, he concentrated on painting, approaching it in an expressionist idiom which he turned into a vehicle for expressing his dramatic concept of reality.

In the late eighties his work gradually became more personal. It was then that his paintings, with their characteristic tension between colour and drawing, between chaos and order, broke free from the image, and abstract automatism pervaded the surface. Through automatism he turned the structure of the picture into the real essence of the work.

In this composition Claramunt uses the canvas itself as a background in a procedure which brings us close to the Surrealism of André Massón (1896-1987) in Horses Attacked by Fish. Sinuous lines, oval shapes, groups of little dots, stipples and briskly applied short strokes form this mood-driven pattern which the artist reduces in chromatic terms to a range of earthy and reddish tones, recalling those he used in his earlier period of bullfighting scenes and Moroccan views — the yellow ochre albero earth in the bullring of Seville or the sand of the African desert.