One of the great Spanish artists of the second half of the 20th century has died at the age of 81 in Madrid, the city of his birth. Trained to be a journalist, in the 1950s Arroyo went off into exile in Paris, where he realized that he had an artistic calling and threw himself first into writing and eventually to painting, the discipline he would stick to until the very end. Indifferent to abstract fashions and influenced by the pop art movement, Arroyo expressed himself in a highly personal figurative language characterized by vivid colors, and pursued a narrative of surrealist tones which was caustic when not outright social protest, along the lines of other artists of the period, such as Equipo Crónica.