After graduating in journalism in 1957, Arroyo moved to Paris with the idea of writing, but soon painting would win out over his literary vocation, though it would always remain central to his artistic practice. His caustic and sarcastic figurative painting puts him in the orbit of , further reinforced by his use of bright colours and flat brushwork with an almost complete lack of depth. His critical stance against dictatorships led him to ridicule and reinterpret Spanish clichés, which made him a target for persecution by Franco’s regime. Though he returned to Spain after Franco’s death, his work did not receive the official recognition it deserved until 1982, the year he was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize.

His experience as a political refugee (1973-1975) was behind the series he dedicated to people suffering repression and exile, including a series of tribute paintings to dead poets, as in the case of Federico García Lorca, of which there is an example in the BBVA Collection. Lorca’s death left a profound mark on a whole generation, and Arroyo dedicated to the poet one of the works in his series of tribute paintings devoted to dead poets. His personal interpretation has a significant cinematic quality, showing a close-up of the handlebars of a bicycle: that modern “uncontrolled” metal horse in Lorca’s ballad to Don Pedro that also acts as an ellipsis of the tragic event: the vehicle driving him to his death in a wooded area close to Fuente Grande, in the foothills of the Alfacar Mountains.

The poet’s signature is superimposed on the image, just as Lorca used to sign, half-drawing half-symbol, in a black tone indistinguishable from the background except when it crosses the metal handlebars: “The blood of poets / who left their souls / to wander all the ways / of Nature.” A sad and melancholic hymn to the futility of intolerance and death.