Gortázar’s work is grounded in his classical training in figurative painting, to which he unreservedly adds an interest in American Pop Art. He is also influenced by the avant-garde Basque school of painting, and a Matissian touch can be noted in his brushwork and use of colour. There is something dreamlike about the narrative we find in his works. They are full of highly personalised symbology, and the ‘painting within a painting’—posing the question of why one should paint and what subject should be depicted—is a recurrent theme. Human figures often appear in variegated, colourist settings characteristic of his work. This feature is exemplified in El salón invadido, where, as in all his paintings, we find multiple references aimed at ensnaring viewers by challenging them to search for and interpret these allusions. A kind of horror vacui fills the canvas, accompanied by a deliberate breaching of the boundary between the interior and the exterior, another characteristic of the artist’s work. In line with the classical tradition of painting, colour and texture are his fields of experimentation. A year after painting this piece, Gortázar executed another with a similar title, El estudio invadido, in which the blank canvas represents the artist’s terror when inspiration does not come.