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From 1963, Zobel, an eminently colorful painter, (remember his first colorful costumbrista Manila paintings and where he became interested in Matisse and the ease with which he used color, playing with the spaces inside and outside the rooms painted, or his stage of learning in Boston influenced by the expressionist painting that at this time was done in this city and which has left us some jewel as the small and colorful paintings dedicated to the Charles River). But as I was saying, in 1963, he felt the need to return to the color he would no longer abandon in all his career, except for a pause, towards the years 1974/1975 where he painted a series of paintings dedicated to the "White Series" and although well It is true that most of these paintings are made on the basis of black and white, using a range of grays with their warm and cold nuances, which sometimes derive in incipient ocres with all their splendors, so we can not talk, as in the 60s, of black and white paint. The same Zobel and despite calling them the White Series, considered them colored squares. And with the color, it incorporates scale, volume, perspective, etc. into his painting. And above all, start looking at the landscape as a theme. Zobel, endowed with a tremendous sensibility and a great and continuous curiosity for everything that surrounded him, it is not surprising that, from these years, in which he began to visit Cuenca and to live there, shortly after; the magnificent and spectacular landscape of this city converge inwardly in it, until becoming the protagonist of many of his works. There are several series dedicated to the diversity of its landscapes and its inscapes: "El Rio" (referring to the river Júcar in its path by Cuenca and in turn the largest of the two rivers that encircle and embrace the city, the Júcar and the Huecar), "La Vista", "Los Hocinos", "Las Orillas" and an endless number of paintings with other titles but that have to do with the nature that it gives off and in which at the same time this city is based. Zobel begins to use these landscapes as a theme, although I would qualify it as a pretext, until it becomes an abstraction, an idea or a memory of it, where it establishes a climate, an unreal and suggestive space that organizes memories and experiences as much of the painter as of the spectator. They are idealized landscapes where the viewer can find, like the painter, his own sensation. But Fernando Zóbel is not limited to the abstraction of the landscape, his subject matter and his interests are very broad and one of his resources with which he continues to learn and study, are his famous "Conversations" or "Dialogues", which consist of the observation about other great artists of the past, where, through his own painting, he studies and investigates the problems and solutions of these classic painters, as a continuous way of learning and assimilating those dilemmas in his own painting. Great is the subject that continually occupies its interest: color, space, geometric composition, perspective, academic studies of gesture and movement, etc., and as is natural, for each of these studies I used to choose the most versatile, learned or daring painters in these subjects, for this reason we find "conversations" and "dialogues" with Matisse, Monet, Dégas, Coorte, Vermeer , Saenredam, Barocci. The list is great and interesting, on occasion I have written that if we followed his notebooks dedicated to this subject, we could make a very particular but interesting History of Art. And also as is the case of this painting: "El Júcar y Saskia Acostada", where through the title we already insinuate a conversation or a dialogue with Rembrandt, but it is curious that almost always that he has established a relationship with this painter, he has more through the study of his drawings and especially of his engravings, than of his own paintings, although I must say that I have seen dozens of paintings, drawings and engravings, which Rembrandt dedicated to his wife Saskia, without finding a relationship or a direct relation because between the title and the subject, although I am convinced, by the spontaneity and ease of the Zóbel stroke, the painting, which is based, as I say, on a drawing or perhaps on an engraving. Zobel, in turn, admired the engraver Rembrandt, even having a small, but chosen collection of his etchings, and his work with the chisel. For all this I would not be surprised, that in this box of Zobel, by the strokes of the drawing and the speed and ease of its execution, where you can guess the echo of a figure in foreshortening, was based more on a drawing by Rembrandt, than in one of his paintings, where he might be more interested in the freshness, improvisation and speed of the moment of that drawing than in the grandiloquence, composition or studied subjects that a greater work could bring. But one of the enigmas for me of this painting and that make it both more interesting and more intriguing, is precisely the title of it. "El Júcar Y Saskia Acostada." It is from precisely these years (1979/80/81), where he begins to use the theme of the Rio (river) through color, not only as a memory or as an imaginary idea of what he remembered as he did in the 60s, but also based directly on the color of the river and its aquatic element, as if wanting to introduce us into that ambiguity between stillness and continuous flow. I remember that the professor and academic Francisco Calvo Serraller, told me that these paintings of Zóbel on the river Júcar (which most, in these years, he titled: "Banks"), reminded him a lot of Chinese poems about water: as a principle of life and as continuous and permanent emanate from it. Me too, more or less conscious and in an exhibition dedicated to this theme of the river in the painting by Fernando Zóbel, I wrote a comment in which he said that the painter at this time seemed to "pretend only to catch on his canvases the continuous run from the water." Having said all this and for all the subject matter that can accumulate the title of the painting: "El Júcar y Saskia Acostada", and even more having met the painter, I would not be surprised that in this work, more than a Dialogue or a Conversation with Rembrandt where a study or investigate a problem or pictorial solution, propose a mental game or a metaphor of one's own life, with certain oriental echoes, where the pleasant rest of Saskia serves as a renewal and flow of life as the flow of the river is continuously renewed. Rafael Pérez-Madero