Renau depicts a landscape with the plastic means of the Escuela de Vallecas, a group of modern Spanish painters pursuing the representation of the Castilian topography as a ruthless land.
Both this reference to the Spanish art of the 1930s and the vultures eating carrion as an allegory of modern wars give this painting a deep sense of melancholy and tragedy.
In this work, Renau advances the presence of skulls that Picasso used recurrently after 1945 to express the trauma of World War II and his experience in the Paris of the German Occupation.
Renau reacts to the trauma of war with angular shapes and expressionistic brushstrokes that remain close to the language of Picasso's Guernica and Joan Miró's The Reaper, two large-format paintings conceived for the Spanish Pavilion in the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris International Exposition) in the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.
Renau played a crucial role in the gestation of the Spanish Pavilion; he was responsible for Picasso's participation[2] and executed a series of photomurals that covered the exterior of the building designed by Josep Lluis Sert and Luis Lacasa.