A self-taught artist, Alfaro’s first steps in the visual arts were in painting and drawing. Later, in the 1950s, after travelling to Paris and Brussels where he saw the exhibition 50 Years of Modern Art, he fully embraced sculpture.

Innovation was a constant driving factor throughout the whole of Alfaro’s career, making it difficult to include him within any specific movement. He was, however, influenced by and by the work of artists like Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), Julio González (1876-1942) and the brothers Antoine Pesvner (1888-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977).

An artist committed with society and with a considerable reputation in Spain and internationally, in 1981 he received Spain’s National Visual Arts Award and in 2007 the IVAM museum in Valencia organised a retrospective of his work.

In the 1970s his sculpture was inflected by the discovery of a structure which he called generatrix in allusion to the geometric concept. In it, a number of rods or laminated tubes are assembled around a single point, from which their movement is generated.

His sculpture is drawn in space with metal materials treated using common industrial processes, something that allowed him to achieve clean finishes and cuts.

Composición en espiral is a prior version—smaller and made in brass—of the work Alfaro presented at the 1976 Venice Biennale, called Bon dia, llibertat (b) or Good day Freedom (b) in allusion to the recent death of Franco, an impressive aluminium work measuring 5.5 x 6 x 2.5 metres, owned by Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona.

It is a rigorously geometric spiral composition of 35 pieces. The form emerges from the relationships between the parts. There is no one complete view, for the artist wanted to create a number of different perspectives to engage the beholder in dialogue, forcing him to discover the work step by step while trying to find an answer.