In the 1980s, Luca de Tena spent six years in Tokyo. Since then, his work has been undergirded by an aesthetic that draws from Eastern tradition. In spite of his apparent isolation, the painterly surface of Rojo I shows a definitely

 all-over 

painting technique consisting in covering the whole surface of a painting with one single treatment, so as to create a sense of overall uniformity without any single or dominant point of view.

treatment with clear echoes ofAbstract Expressionism. The practice he developed after that and his current work is closer to figuration, but always maintaining a splattering effect that provides a sense of overall unity.

The artist attains a texture and a highly elegant chromatic effect through the superimposition of layers of paint. In this work, the surface of the dark background is dotted with flashes of light of varied intensity, coming from inside and creating an extremely subtle nebula effect. The uniformity of the canvas is broken by a fiery sparkle that reinforces the expressive load and acts as a visual support.