Andreu Alfaro is one of the most outstanding Spanish sculptors from the second half of the twentieth century. A self-taught artist, Alfaro’s first steps in the visual arts were in painting and drawing before dedicating himself full-time to sculpture in the 1950s, after travelling to Paris and Brussels where he saw the exhibition 50 Years of Modern Art, held as part of the programme for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, and as a symbol of the triumph of modernism in the arts worldwide.

Innovation and experimentation, both with material and in formal aspects, were constant factors driving 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), Julio González (1876-1942), Antoine Pesvner (1888-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977), whose works he had seen during the Universal Expo in 1958.

Although Alfaro focused mostly on sculpture, his work on paper also occupied a pivotal role throughout his trajectory. His earliest artistic expressions were rendered in drawings, in which he always laid the foundations for his later experimentation. The first drawings he exhibited in 1957 at Sala Mateu (Valencia), made without lifting the pencil from the paper, show a determined, categorical and linear mark reminiscent of the geometric architecture of constructivist artists. In stylistic terms, these compositions coincided with the filament sculptures he created in the 1950s, in which solid volumes disappeared to give way to the void and to empty space as the main element in each composition.

Alfaro’s ongoing visual research led him to create a number of sculptures in the late 1960s known as generatrices, which established his reputation as a sculptor of works for the public space. In them, the artist connects a number of straight metal rods around a central axis. The juxtaposition produces a three-dimensional curved effect that seems to irradiate a vibrant energy from inside. With its powerful semantic charge, this body of work evokes natural phenomena, like the movement generated by the wind, the flight of birds or the slight displacement of vegetation as a consequence of certain atmospheric occurrences.

In the period comprised between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, Alfaro created his series Bufantines, consisting of a number of works rendered using on paper. In them he carries out a two-dimensional reinterpretation of the basic principles of his generatrices.

This untitled work in the BBVA Collection belongs to that series. Through a repetition of parallel planes, it undertakes a subtle contortion, accentuated by an elegant use of chiaroscuro. In it, Alfaro plays with the same optical principles of the generatrices and manages to convey a sensation of volume that evokes the three-dimensional corporeity of his sculptures.