In the words of the artist Asier Mendizabal: "One of the most frequently mentioned interpretative keys to the enormous amount of work carried out by Balerdi until his unfortunate interruption after his death in 1992 is that of compulsion.  Not only the thousands of drawings he made continuously, but also the random path that his nervous strokes left in the first lines on the paper, which were then recomposed in forms subjected to that first gesture, seem to be explained by a barely controlled and semi-conscious automatism.  The two most usual explanations for this compulsion are therefore pertinent, which allude to his physical condition (the epilepsy he always seemed to try to avoid) and his interest in a certain transcendent mysticism which, hand in hand with the tradition of yoga and Indian religious philosophy, would seem to predispose him to trance and meditation in the abandonment of gestural repetition, exercise or even prayer".

In the previous exhibition presented at the gallery: "Homage to Tarzan.  Chapter 1: The unconscious hunter" in 2008 showed an example of this compulsion through its application to the medium of film through an animated film in which Balerdi replicates the mechanism of cinema by tracing with his stroke each of the frames of several fragments of a Tarzan film.  On this occasion, we present a series of large-format oil paintings on canvas in which the compulsive stroke interacts with intense colours that the artist probably perceived in his subconscious when he was recovering from his frequent epileptic seizures.

Balerdi played an important role in the Basque and Spanish art scene from the 1960s onwards. He took part in the creation of the Gaur group together with Basterretxea, Chillida and Oteiza, among others, which was presented at the Barandiarán Gallery in San Sebastián and later exhibited together with the Biscayan group Emen at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, and later with the Orain group at the Provincial Museum of Álava in Vitoria.