Xavier Grau literally needs to lose himself in the canvas, yielding to the vertigo the blankness produces at the very moment he mars it with the first brushstroke. The work takes shape as he paints; its mystery stems from the complexity of superpositions that from an irregular network of spiderlike webs which seem to hold each element in place. For all his apparent spontaneity, Grau is an extremely self-conscious painter; he is cautious in his approach to the forms that derive from colors that have expanded on the canvas and which he unites with the contiguous figures that are also born from