In Filing Cards (1979) Luis Gordillo starts with an unusual object, a sort of 'found support' with strong connotations as a fungible material. The cardboard cards used for office notes, library catalogues or for arranging notes for speeches and public addresses reflect the Sevillian painter's renowned penchant for archiving, compilation and reuse. It is this objectual aspect that makes this work unique in Gordillo's extensive canon and it is also an early example of his transition to softer colours, which was to be a feature of his work from the 1980s. The grid format imposed by the dimensions of the card gives the work the appearance of a comic strip, although, as Gordillo himself has said of these pieces, 'You shouldn't read it from left to right or from top to bottom, but in its entirety, like any other painting'. This confirms how these grid pieces summarise the particular tension between gestural and geometric manifestation, freedom and control, to be found in his work. It is an attempt to get beyond the dialectic of abstraction and figuration through an expressiveness in which the corporeal and the carnal are contained by the constricts of the straight line.

Filing Cards is close in structure and concept to Gordillo's Post-Abstract Drawings of the 1960s, which marked a paradigm shift in his painting. More than a decade later, it clearly reveals the biomorphic, visceral and intentionally labile language of the most recognisable version of the artist, during a period in which he was acting as patron to a new generation of young Spanish painters that had emerged in the 1970s. However, the most immediate origins of Filing Cards can be seen in his works based on photographs, which revolutionised his oeuvre. They include Enchanting Green Child (1974, private collection, Madrid), Oedipean Sequences (1976, artist's collection) and Soft Series A (1976, artist's collection), where one can catch a glimpse of some of the features which, in Filing Cards make the human element coexist with the mechanical, caricatured or monstrous, the rational with the irrational. Indeed, the very dimensions of the card are the same as the most common format for home photography, 15 x 10 cm (6 x 4 in), the same that the painter often uses as a piece of collage or as the starting point for further pictorial derivations. Thus, what were once photographs, here used as 'notes', have now momentarily become these filing cards, items of stationery for sketching down notes for ideas or tasks.

Carlos Martín