On the left, a church; on the right, a factory. The composition of this diptych sets up this opposition only to show how little it matters to the people inside it. The figures rest, exhausted.
The title of the painting is Pantallas, and these are precisely the strangest objects in the scene. Lying on the muddy bank and half-sunk in the water, they are not the glowing portals to other worlds we see in later paintings like “Charlando” or the slick surface of “Reflejo de luz de iPad”. They are the heavy, obsolete television sets of a past era, cathode-ray tubes turned into junk. They are beached fossils. Their blank faces reflect nothing.
The figures themselves are a catalogue of disconnected states: walking, resting, holding each other, looking away. The pastoral scene turns our attention toward the atmosphere, the strange collage of elements. It finds a distant, inverted echo in the work of an artist like George Bellows, whose 1906 painting, River Rats, shows street urchins on the shores of New York teeming with energy. The figures in Pantallas, by contrast, have none of that shared vitality. They share a space, but not a moment. They are together, but not with one another.