Pablo Sycet is an Andalusian painter and designer who played an active part in the movida, the eighties Madrid-based counterculture movement. In 1982 he founded the Ciudad Diseño studio in Granada with the painter Julio Juste (1952).

Like other artists of his generation, Sycet has been associated with American . He is particularly interested in the colour spreading used by artists like Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) in their work. However, he has also been decisively influenced by the line and lyricism of French painting, personified by Claude Monet (1840-1926), as well as by the work of contemporary Spanish painters —José Guerrero (1914-1991), Jordi Teixidor (1941) and Albert Ràfols-Casamada (1923-2009)— whose colour and painterly expression are his main source of inspiration.

Here the artist captures our attention with a large, triangular patch of bright red, which seems to advance, sweeping away everything in its path; as if he were alluding, through this fiery colour, to the need to quench one’s thirst in the burning heat. The cooler blue, green and purple brushstrokes balance and temper the heat of the red and express immersion in an aquatic blue, a quest for serenity.

The work’s full title, which appears on the back, Como locos por el agua (representación al amor de dos parejas al uso) [Like those dying for water (representation of the love of two typical couples)], refers to the physical need arising from desire.