A grandson of the seascape painter Enrique Sánchez, José Luís Fajardo’s early contact with painting and his natural drawing skills encouraged him to take up architecture, although since the early sixties he had already started to focus on visual arts. Soon afterwards, in 1964 he left his hometown of La Laguna in the Canary Islands to move to Madrid.
 
His wide-ranging cultural education gave him the right background to become a self-taught artist, removed from conventional academic tenets. And although the main avant-garde movements were happening far away from the Canary Islands, it had produced two of the leading artists in the groundbreaking El Paso group [Millares (1926-1972) and Chirino (1925)] and this acted as a kind of spur for both himself and his good friend and sculptor José Abad (1942).
 
From a ground base in abstraction, the artist built a relationship with the geometric plane that would make an appearance in his early works and would remain a constant running through almost all his later output. His alphabet pieces were followed by magical portraits of strange sombre characters with nocturnal faces and diffuse outlines that transform into diminished beings with amputated bodies with their viscera exposed, before returning once again to abstraction thanks to his discovery of aluminium, a new material that distanced him from his chronicles of horror.
 
And he uses aluminium not as a support, but as a vehicle for the action he develops; as a given material; as a surface that accepts the print of graphic incisions using techniques that allow him to obtain the volumes he is after; reliefs that emerge from the surface of the work, protruding into space towards the spectator. Some of the forms are doubled or folded around a central axis, like the dyes of the decalcomania technique also used by his fellow Canarian artist Oscar Domínguez (1906-1957) to render his surrealistic deliriums. However there is nothing random or casual about his works, rather they are like imaginary anatomies and architectures. In his mural works, the purity of the aluminium sheet enables him to engage with the wall, yet this time not a wall full of past history, but a new space to be built from scratch.
 
There is a drive towards luminosity, towards clarity, towards abstract plenitude and never the void. Fajardo has the ability to reconvert chaotic surroundings into a space of evident simplicity, though one can appreciate the restless form of a trace or prints that foreshadow the arrival of something unknown.