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. Also worth underscoring in his painting output is the highly theatrical compositional approach, something clearly on view in Toute la ville en parle and La Nuit espagnole. At the end of the sixties and early seventies he started working in the theatre thanks to a commission from the stage director Klaus Michael Grüber. The passion this new discipline awoke in him encouraged Arroyo to repeat the experience on many further occasions, and even to write a stage play.

Behind the series from 1985 he titled La Nuit espagnole there is one painted sixty-three years earlier by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and another version of the work of the French master made in 1965 by Arroyo himself. It combines two recurrent features of his practice: references to Spanishness, often through ironic citation, and challenges to 20^th century painters and painting. However, in this specific work, more than a critique of modern masters, there is a reflection on their work. In this case, Arroyo addresses the work of one of his favourite artists, Picabia, whose painting he alters and makes his own.

In Picabia’s work the space is divided into two areas, on which two slightly juxtaposed figures are outlined: that of a male dancer in black on white, and a naked woman partially covered by two concentric circles of warm colours, in white on black. In the work painted by Arroyo, the figures have their feet on the ground and each one inhabits his/her space. The male dancer seems to be split into three silhouettes; the woman is dressed, and one of the concentric circles has been transformed into a mask of sorts partially covering her face.

The blackness flooding the surface of the painting is lit up by a bolt of lightning, cutting through the night and allowing us to see the figures peopling this nocturnal space; a struggle between light and shadow, a fleeting moment that makes it possible for us to partake in what is going on in that modern metropolis.

In this work, the artist combines a repertoire of techniques. Using pencil, pastel, acrylic and watercolour, he works on cardboards of various colours that he glues to a single cardboard sheet that is in turn glued onto a canvas.