Montoya was influenced in the eighties by the Neo-Expressionism which dominated Spanish figurative art at that time, as is evident in the limited number of elements and the appearance of the figure. It was also then that he adopted a graphic style closer to drawing, which he has maintained ever since.

In the seventies and eighties he developed a personal idiom in which one detects echoes of Francis Picabia (1879-1953) in the superimposition of images, of Paul Klee (1879-1940) in his figurative mode, of Joan Miró (1893-1907) in the abstract nature of his characters, and of the of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978).

His art is a reflection and expression of his emotions and vital passions. This was perhaps why his work went through an artistic crisis from 1987, coinciding with a crisis in his life due to the illness of his close friend Rafael Baixeras (1947-1989), with whom he had shared his personal and artistic development since the seventies, when they were both members of the Seis y cuatrogroup.

The title of this work refers to a line from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “L’Invitation au voyage”, a pastoral theme already depicted by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) in 1904. In contrast to Matisse’s bucolic atmosphere, Montoya’s interpretation is pervaded by a perverse eroticism, a Romantic delirium of love and death, in which the central figure is rather like a modern totem, halfway between a robot and a metaphysical mannequin.