Born in Minho, Raúl Perez presented himself to the public for the first time in 1972 at Galeria São Mamede in Lisbon, aged 28 at the time. In the previous decade he had met Mário Cesariny and Cruzeiro Seixas, when he discovered, in his own words, "a kinship" between his imagery and surrealism. Although he refuses definitions and cannot be integrated into the historical groups of Portuguese surrealism, this will be structuring in all his production.

In the early 1970s he joined the group Phases, created by Édouard Jaguer in the wake of surrealism.

In this gouache on paper from 1976 - which was revisited in 1981, with small variations, in an oil on canvas - Raúl Perez presents us with one of his enigmatic landscapes inhabited by silence. As Cruzeiro Seixas claims, his works are "a premonition, an omen", echoing a suspension of time in his empty architectures and faceless dreamlike beings that brings them close to the works of Giorgio de Chirico. The chromatic restraint, giving up colour and restricting itself to a range of shades between black and white, contributes to this sensation of desolation of the landscape and the anguish of a waiting.

Against a black background suggesting a night sky, the artist composes the space through two architectural structures: one higher up in the foreground, the other in the background at a lower level. The diagonals and the rhythm of the openings of the architectural structures energise the composition, as do the winged beings that peek into their voids and thus refuse us a face. These are dreamlike landscapes, abandoned long ago, as the author lets us glimpse through the slow deterioration of the surfaces of the building façades. The beings that inhabit them fly, reiterating with a suspension in space that which is also a suspension in time.