A self-taught artist, Joaquim Rodrigo began painting in a figurative style that already announced his desire to develop pictorial experiments beyond the models and conventions of the mimetic representation of reality. In the 1950's, he began a geometric and abstract phase marked by economy and synthesis of form, expressed in compositions in which he worked on straight lines, generating simple geometric shapes. This painting integrates this line of research, informed and attentive to the rules of geometry and mathematics: distributed in a careful orthogonal grid, the forms relate to each other, creating a compositional solution reminiscent of Mondrian and which reflects the artist's interest in the multiple possibilities of exploring the two-dimensional space of pictorial representation.

The formal relations of proportion and rhythm of the composition are highlighted by the flat, contrasting and vibrant colours, highlighting the fact that, in this painting, Rodrigo experiments for the first time with a new chromatic scheme of fertile tones that contaminate each other, in an elaborate combination of secondary nuances and the non-colours black and white, establishing a subtle departure from pure abstract rigour. This deviation is also instigated by the title of the work - a reference to the beach of Vau, one of his living spaces, located in the Algarve (in the south of Portugal) - which allows the observer to make a plane and almost cartographic reading of the composition, as if it were a systematised aerial view. In this sense, without yet contradicting the constructivist geometrism or the neo-plasticist chromaticism, one already notes the suggestion of a vague neo-figuration that would be explored in the following decade.

JB