In this oil painting, a foreground of thick, wrinkled horizontal brush-strokes passes out of sight through a curved street whose vanishing point hides somewhere on the right. It is a street full of windows, of dark, impenetrable paired openings, black shapes of a single brush-stroke pasted over façades with thick, coarse eaves. Windows peer the obscure clarity exhaled by the uneven pavement of the street, by the roofs, the building ornaments, the railings of the balconies. The grey, pearly colours of the painting recall cloudy days, they are like the grey lives that seem to be the figures’, who walk along covered with a thick layer of sadness: astonished figures who however, indifferently to surprise, continue their course.

The streets in Alvarez are often like this: silent spaces traversed by figures who do not seem to dare to think, to dream. They are beings charged with an irremediable lack, who thrust their sadness onto the retracted houses, onto the even sadder stare of the windows. They carry with them their loneliness, thick as the artist’s paint.

The originality of this painting within the context of Alvarez’ work is not due to the composition, the arrangement of the figures or the perspective used. Rather, its singularity resides in the snow that covers the landscape – as rare in the artist’s work as are days of snow around Oporto, where he lived and worked. It is a cold, colourless landscape with more ground than sky; a landscape that seems made of ashes, as if it were one of those winter days where night falls before daylight has broken through.

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