In this oil painting, two sides of a rural square seem to form a continuous line of buildings, ordering the image in three irregular horizontal planes: on top, the uniform sky, neatly straightened out by brush-strokes of similar texture; in the middle, façades painted with a reddish ochre, like clay or rust – with half-closed windows for light to pass without letting in the heath of the clear day; and below the large void of an empty square, covered by hot sand which the shadow cast by the buildings on the left darkens, refreshes and cools down. But the outline of this shadow is strangely aligned with the eaves of the left houses, drawing a diagonal which now structures the image in two triangular spaces unevenly illuminated: one, on the right, is remote, smoother, brightly coloured by the hot sunlight; the other is closer and darker, colder also, made up of thick and pasty brush-strokes – see the ash-coloured bases of the houses and the mouldings of doors and windows, of the pavement. A pavement which is also a grey line subdividing this triangle in a coloured area of façades and the the dark and neutral triangle of the square.

This area darkened by the shadow is the only inhabited space in this hot summer day. There, three similar figures move through an ingrained routine: the same pace, the same hat, the same clothes. It could be the same man tripled, simultaneously entering and leaving the same house, as though this were the only possible voyage in a rural and customary place.

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