LUXEMBURG.- The Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art presents Eduardo Arroyo on view through March 14, 2004. Eduardo Arroyo (Madrid, 1937) is one of the most well-known contemporary Spanish painters in the world.  Eduardo Arroyo occupies a unique place in the panorama of Spanish art over the last fifty years, one characterised by the critical and reflexive nature of his work. Arroyo’s universe reveals an incisive and often provocative commitment to the problems of our day, but it is also a lucid and playful reflection on pictorial tradition and the most recent creative trends. The artist uses everyday life to express his deliberate engagement with «time and space». Or, to put it another way, with life and history. Multi-faceted and with great narrative versatility, covering painting, set design, theatre writing, and a passion for bull-fighting, boxing, theatre, and Joyce.

Arroyo’s passion for literature – another recurring feature of his work over the years which has led him, among other things, to illustrate numerous publications, such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses” - is present in paintings which focus on numerous figures from the world of literature whom Arroyo particularly admired, such as Stendhal or Flaubert. One example is “Correspondencia de Jaime Sabartés a Bergamín” (Letters from Jaime Sabartés to Bergamín), in which the artist reveals his talent for portrait and caricature. His intentions draw the viewer in, leading him towards a critical, unprejudiced reading of situations, moods and characters.

From the moment he moved to Paris as an exile, Arroyo did not cease in repudiating, through his art, the Spanish civil war and its immediate consequence: the dictatorship of General Franco. Eduardo Arroyo, a painter par excellence of the Spanish democratic transition, has contributed a new type of narrative to traditional Spanish painting: humour, sharp irony, and warm, sparkling figurative verbalisation, in which the influence of his initial vocation, as a writer can be clearly seen.