R. Cabrera (XX) - Umbrales del instinto

R. Cabrera - Thresholds of Instinct
Oil on canvas - Hand-signed - 2023

Artwork by the artist R. Cabrera (XX), created in the oil on canvas technique.
We guarantee a durable product with visual quality.
Dimensions: 80 x 60 cm painting with a depth of 3 cm.
On the back of the piece, you will find the details about the work.
The shipment will be made through United Parcel Service (UPS) for Spain and Europe, and through Fedex for the rest of the world.
The work will be rolled up and will be protected by several layers of packaging, bubble nylon, and placed in a sturdy tube.
Once the work has been paid for, three days are required for the packaging process and delivery to the shipping company.
The piece will arrive within ten days, depending on the destination country.
This oil painting on canvas unfolds like a small visual fable trapped in a moment of silent astonishment. The compositional device is based on a structure of windows — literal and metaphorical — where the narrative elements peek out, almost suspended, at the edge of the action. This contained tension is the emotional core of the work.

At the top, a mouse, depicted with meticulous realism, peeks its body out from a rectangular opening, with the snout extended as if exploring the unknown. Its posture, half-out and paused, expresses a wavering between curiosity and danger. Below, the eyes of a cat —green, large, fixed— watch him from another opening with a mix of surprise, play, and latent desire. His snout points upward, precisely toward where the mouse is, creating a subtle but unmistakable narrative tension. Between them, an orange butterfly, luminous and light, crosses the space as an ethereal witness, balancing the composition with ease and color.

From a technical point of view, the work is a refined example of trompe l'oeil: the shadows are meticulously crafted to suggest three-dimensionality, while the textures—especially in the cat's whiskers, the mouse's fur, and the butterfly's wings—are handled with notable pictorial skill. The flat surface of the canvas is transformed, through illusionism, into a scene that transcends its materiality, challenging the viewer to look again to discern what is real and what is representation.

Conceptually, painting plays with primal instincts: the hunt, fear, vigilance, but also with the stillness before movement. There is no violence or explicit drama; what prevails is domestic suspense and an atmosphere that recalls the mute theatre of nature. The use of the window-frame composition alludes to the notion of observer and observed, establishing a metaphor about art itself: looking through a window—as the viewer of the canvas does—is to witness a frozen, yet alive, story.

The white, clean background allows the protagonists to emerge more forcefully, stripped of any distraction. This endows the scene with a sculptural quality, almost symbolic: the butterfly as freedom, the mouse as innocence, the cat as predatory conscience — all contained within a space of strict geometry.
"Thresholds of Instinct" is a work that blends the technique of classical art with contemporary visual storytelling. Its elements arranged in levels not only build a scene but a metaphor about the act of looking and being looked at. In its play between the pictorial and the scenographic, this image does not narrate an ending, but the threshold of the event: that moment when everything can happen or simply not happen.

We wish for the full enjoyment of art.