Álvaro Lapa has always had a self-taught and detached attitude, although he was very attentive to art history and contemporary artistic movements. His first works, created in the first half of the 1960s, reveal a certain surrealist influence and demonstrate his interest in anti-aestheticism and search for an - anti-form.
He explored those interests by using "noble" materials and researching the idea of the defragmentation or the unfinished. - Painting
(1969-71) is still part of this line of work, although at a more mature conceptual stage. The composition has an abstract matrix and is marked by schematic simplification and chromatic delimitation of the forms, whose flatness emphasises the two-dimensionality of the support, highlighting the painting - itself
. Standing out through the intense contrast with the luminosity of the large areas of blue and white, the dense black forms and lines that inhabit the pictorial space are part of the system of signs that forms the painter's plastic lexicon.

Surrounded by a black frame that outlines the whole composition, like a window opening before the viewer, this ascetic painting depicts a kind of metaphysical landscape made up of fragmentary elements that make a definitive or stabilised external reading difficult. The presence of the black element that dominates the centre of the canvas, and to which the observer's gaze converges, creates a visual imposition that is harmonized through the games of balance with the remaining chromatic and formal elements. The use of the colour black, which is constant in Lapa's work, is related to his research on "informality" and "emptiness" in the pictorial space. Simultaneously, it allows him to create austere and refined forms that highlight the idea of permanence, duration, eternity and mystery - of the human being and, with it, of art itself.

JB