Valca II (1981) is a painting with a grid structure that divides its surface into rectangles. José Luis Alexanco’s study of forms as part of his artistic research led to works such as Valca II, a pictorial ‘sequence’ referring to other patterns and arrangements linked to the experimental practices in which the author was actively involved. Other spaces and projects include the Computing Centre at Madrid University and seminars on Automatic Generation of Art Forms, along with his research into computer processes applied to the field of visual arts.

In the 1980s José Luis Alexanco exhibited his work at solo shows organised by Fernando Vijande at his gallery in Madrid. In a text written in 1982, just a year after this painting, historian Francisco Calvo Serraller highlighted the importance of the process in the artist’s work: ‘It was then when I clearly noticed the time unit that has prevailed in Alexanco’s creative system, which could be called, and never better than here, his music, which is played with the endless cadence of a fugue.  Tangled in it, under the effect of the recurrence to be found there, we end up losing the idea of start and end; we finally see only the pure development that it essentially is. And it is in this regard, along with the unfolding by means of which this Expressionist seeks to counterbalance in a disciplined manner his spontaneous subjective freedom, that all the process appears as a beauty mechanism, a work that miraculously gives the impression of going alone’. 

That idea of an inherent system that is self-generated is one of the pointers to understanding Valca II; the work is seen as a sequence of images, a constant and ‘ordered succession’ of increasing forms; and their parallel with a ‘script’ seeks to tell a tale, a storyline unit. Consecutive planes, ‘rooms’, where Alexanco contains and simultaneously deploys the aspects of the atypical vocabulary that he produced throughout his long career.

Beatriz Herráez