Millares’ arrival in mainland Spain in the fifties brought him into contact with the ‘black’ tradition of Castile and the Generation of ’98, which encouraged an artistic desire for destruction and the denial of space and matter. This acrylic on canvas clearly points to the artist’s final stage, achieved in the late sixties, where an insistent use of black and white sees large tonal masses traversing empty backgrounds, clearly identifying his work with the abstraction of Informalism. Millares incorporates painted burlap or sackcloth and turns it into a field of experimentation. In this case, the burlap is wrinkled and folded-in on itself to achieve an effect of powerful tension. The artist makes an ironic reference to the pictorial tradition of representation by using the word cuadro (picture) as the title. Like most of Millares’ works, expressive gestures appeal to the unconscious, evoking fear, a sense of destruction and dark shadows that are both personal and collective. ‘With a life force – the ethical motor of any work of art – stimulated by the positive-negative action of reality, a new way of feeling flows through an unknown expressive matter’, as the artist explained in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Ateneo de Madrid in 1963.