Initially starting out from the postulates of Surrealism in the pre-war period, Rodríguez Luna’s republican ideals led him towards a more realist aesthetic, inflected with social and revolutionary concerns, especially during the Spanish Civil War itself. This is particularly evident in his portfolio Dieciséis dibujos de guerra, and later, after he went into exile to Mexico, in his collaboration with David Alfaro Siqueiros on a large mural for the Sindicato de los Electricistas labour union.

After settling in Mexico City, his painting gradually evolved towards expressionist and informalist compositions. Besides working as a teacher at ENAP (Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas), Rodríguez Luna also worked as an illustrator of books and held several exhibitions, including two large monographic shows at Museo de Arte Moderno de México (1956 and 1980) and an exhibition at Galería Juana Mordó in Madrid (1976). For this last-named show he travelled to Spain for the first time since his exile following the war. During this visit the seed was sown for the subsequent creation of Museo Antonio Rodríguez Luna in 1982 in his home town of Montoro, to which he returned in 1985, dying a few months later.

Despite his long exile in Mexico, his painting still bore the marks of his home land. This is evident when we compare his early works with those made in the seventies, in which one can ascertain how the basic principles of his style remained unchanged. This is the case of the work in the BBVA collection, which was included in the exhibition at Galería Juana Mordó in 1976. In this canvas, charged with a tender quality inherited from his expressionist phase, the play of black and white takes over the whole space and invites us to enter the poetic and metaphoric universe of his creative essence. Here, his everyday themes are reduced to lineal organizations, form and colour.