Eduardo Arroyo is today considered one of the great Spanish painters of his generation. Born in 1937 in Madrid and attached to the Figuration Narrative movement that developed in Europe in the early 1960s, he paints humanity through sets of images whose origin is society as well as history, art history or literature. Eduardo Arroyo, who is also a writer, uses fragmentary narration with humor and a taste for paradox. It is translated into a pictorial work extremely constructed and showing a constant freedom.
A committed artist, Eduardo Arroyo refuses any complacent aestheticization of art and defends the exemplarity of the work, the strength of the image. He wants his painting to be accessible to as many people as possible. His canvases are painted in solid colors, but he also frequently uses collage. He also creates sculptures using clay, iron, stone, plaster and bronze. The use of "nonsense", of the absurd, makes him a direct heir of Lewis Caroll and Francis Picabia.
"Painting is in a way literary; and it is in this sense that I work on themes. There is a beginning, an end, characters, and the ambiguity of novels. It is therefore a narrative, as if I had written fifteen novels...", explains Eduardo Arroyo. Daniel Rondeau recalls: "Arroyo began as a writer and remained so, even when he paints," and he believes: "A novel sleeps under each of his images.