In 1947 August Puig moved to Paris on a scholarship from the Institut français. He was one of the first Spanish artists to try his luck in the city after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. These two paintings date from those formative years. Though he soon embraced the informal abstraction taking hold in Europe and America, these two oils still reveal his kinship with the surrealism of the Dau al Set artists and figures such as Kandinsky and Miró. Puig’s painting is charged with electric energy, alive with dynamic, metamorphic figures, forms and faces. Typical scenes from the time feature organic beings evoking both animal and human worlds vaguely floating in some indeterminate space. Some seem aquatic, others distinctly demonic. In certain nooks of the canvas, he sets small eyes, at once enraged and lost. His is a poetic, mysterious world, both aggressive and intense, connecting us with the deepest currents of the human soul.