The background of the painting is a warm brownish, purplish grey, which defines the outline of the rectangle and the upper part of the bodies. The pastel is applied as a ‘cosmetic’ base, almost to the point of saturation. Any perception of the support vanishes beneath this layer of scratched and scrubbed oil. The two women’s bodies are shaped by a build-up of varying skin tones that absorb the colours of the clothes and the space, a plush rug that contextualises them and gives them a sense of weight.

They are paintings without transparency. There is no liquid or fluid side – on the contrary, it is an accumulation of oil paste, a pasty body, that reveals itself in the various depths of markings made using oil bars – sometimes thinner, sometimes thicker – scrubbed or smudged. The bodies are ‘plastic,’ constructed from that compulsive way of scratching the pigment – a mix of ‘raw’ oil finished later with a drawing that is finer and more precise than the matter it delineates. 

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The scratching is suspended, the pose of the bodies evoking the artist’s gesture as she incessantly applies the pigment. The floor is built from a successive scratching and rubbing in of the oil. This repetition of gestures provokes a sensation of motion and time dragging out at different speeds. The colours of the bodies: Venetian reds, ochres and dirty whites spread across the floor, with a restlessness that contrasts with the static pose of the models, whose immobile bodies seem petrified, a result of the tension introduced to the pose. The dynamism of the painting can be glimpsed in the plush rug that resembles animal skin, which welcomes the primitive gestures… a scrabbling into the past, the same period as the clothes they wear – nostalgic, youthful, suggesting an age when impressions leave marks.

Open-mouthed, one figure is an echo of the other, in a tune resembling a low and continuous ‘growl.’ It acts as a lament that reverberates in the continuous markings of the horizontal plane of the painting – a whine in a reflective tone translated into repetitive scratches, the sound of a deep, sharp feeling that rises from the guts – a condition.