We give a class of timed regular expressions that involve the use of colored parentheses for specifying timing constraints. The expressions are given in a matricial format, and their semantics is based upon an "overlapping concatenation" of timed words. We then give a calculus for emptiness checking of a regular expression, that does not go through translating expressions into timed automata. To this end we use the class of 2n-automata, studied in a parallel paper [Dim02] in connection with the problem of representing timing constraints.