Between historic expressionism and its neo-figurative updates of the ‘60s, Distéfano’s paintings constitute a search for a personal idiom. By returning to the human figure that emerges from the gestural farrago offered by informalism, he is free to conceive his characters as immersed in their own subjectivities, but also, in a fragmentary way, to draw attention to the environment that affects and penetrates them. Despite their bright colours, there is a sense of unease and claustrophobia in these works, which resolves itself in the oppression of a chaotic graphism, later replaced by a type of linear circling, a plane of colour or a decorative strip that limits space like a barrier, or by the repetition of an image-symbol like the keyhole. In 1964 he works with racks shaped like torsos or boxes, and plays on the ambiguity afforded by the pictorial illusions of varying thicknesses and concavities and plain “real” reliefs. His painting is objectualised as much as the thing it represents: individuals fading into the mass society.