Since 1984, Julio Mateo has conceived and executed the first six of a continuing series of large scale, thematically related painting cycles treating diverse aspects of artistic and natural creation. They explore abstract painting's potential to evoke images bridging the essential concerns common to philosophy, mythology, physical science, and psychology through the use of elemental abstract gestures and signs...

Ode to Nature, a suite of twelve paintings from 1985-86, explores natural structures throughout different levels of life: from the subatomic to the cosmic, and from the mineral to the organic. These elemental, yet compositionally complex paintings express the harmony of natural law underlying Creation.

The Rhapsodies, a series of fifteen paintings from 1986, celebrates the process of creation from the metaphysical level of archetypes to their material manifestation in the universe of form. Partly about nature and partly about the realm of abstract ideas, the Rhapsodies trace the transmutation of concepts into manifest forms across the subtle boundary between energy and matter.