Mimmo Paladino is among a small group of influential artists who reintroduced figurative painting in the late 1970s and 1980s. Room in a Tempest depicts a figure kneeling in the center of a brilliant red room that is sparsely furnished with an assortment of modernist furniture, ethnographic sculpture, and other miscellaneous objects. This enormous canvas is framed by scrapes of lumber and used molding that impart a sense of timeworn history. Although painted in thick, impasto vibrant reds and yellows, an eerie calm pervades the scene, suggesting that the tempest in this room may be some sort of psychological or emotional turbulence suffered by the isolated protagonist.