In Juan Francisco Casas's images, we see flowers, but they are also scenes dominated by red as a common thread and as a symbol of blood, desire, violence, and power. In The Sexual Night, Casas recovers the historical weight of this colour and its association with the carnal and the forbidden. “Red is the first colour in the history of humanity, and its connotations are multiple: sex, beauty, death... I want all of them to appear in one way or another in the viewer's mind,” Casas reveals.

The starting point for The sexual night is the eponymous work by Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 1948), a key figure in French literary thought who posits a peculiar relationship between image, body, and thought. “In his book, Quignard links the mirror with sex and symmetry with a primal fear. These phrases about symmetry were one of the main triggers for the genesis of the exhibition.” The artist reveals that this book by the French intellectual touched on themes that particularly interested him. “His writing seems hypnotic to me, and for that reason, I haven't tried to illustrate the book but rather to use it as a catalyst.” Casas approaches the images described in the book from a lyrical perspective and explains that “the exhibition is a very free approach to the invisible scenes of the book (Actaeon and Diana in their bath, The Furies, Baubo and Demeter, or Eros and Psyche), not to the images of these paintings but to Quignard's words as interpreted through my images.”

The exhibition also draws on influences from other spheres and periods of art. For example, there are references to the work of the Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch (The Hague, 1664 – Amsterdam, 1750), a virtuoso of technique and symbolism in her depictions of flowers, who became court painter in Düsseldorf. Casas reinterprets her work with a contemporary perspective, moving from the Baroque still life to a sexualized and conceptual one, where the flower ceases to be merely an image and becomes an idea. He also incorporates the kaleidoscopic performance experiences of Rocío Ciarán and her sensual lipsticks that hypnotically permeate the canvases.