Campano’s love of painting is evident in his unique personal language. In his own words, his master was José Guerrero (1914-1991): “it was he who guided me towards painting. I was coming from other forms of art, from bricolage, things that were not pure painting. His lesson was to channel me towards pure painting”.

After his early experimentation with automatism, in the 1970s he turned to the work of Gerardo Rueda (1926-1996) and Gustavo Torner (1925) as guidelines, a that would offer him a way of ordering his painting both compositionally and chromatically. In 1974 he moved to Paris, where his painting expanded and freed itself from ties, more in step with US expressionism. This in turn led him towards larger formats and greater expressiveness and dynamism. In the 1980s he started working on series addressing poetic themes or reinterpretations of works by great painters of the past who he admired, such as Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Paul Cézanne (1839-1906).

His two series on Voyelles (Vowels) are based on a literary reference, Arthur Rimbaud’s universal poem with the same title. Joan Miró (1893-1983) had already taken the famous sonnet as the source for one of his works, El sonido de las vocales (1966). In each line, Rimbaud wanted to spark “the sentiment provoked by that letter as if it were a living being with its own inner life.” By associating the letter to a particular colour, he endows each vowel with a chromatic resonance, thus creating a double perception of its essence.

In the case of this work, he uses the following lines as a reference: “I rouge… / I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles / Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes…” [I red… / I, purples, spat blood, laughing of beautiful lips in anger or in penitent raptures].

I Roja belongs to the first series of Voyelles, which he began working on in 1979 and which, unlike the later series, exudes colour. According to Juan Manuel Bonet, the starting point for this series was a “naturalistic watercolour” Campano incorporated to several large-format paintings. Highly gestural and reminiscent of José Guerrero, the surface of the canvas, whose organisation and composition are indicative of serious analysis, is covered with a nearly liquid paint. Equally patent is the influence of Jasper Johns (1930) in the presence of the letter conceived as a figure.

The second series of Voyelles, made four years later, is dominated by black and white. Afterwards, colour would return to his work, and Campano would use it to continue defending his liking for painting.