Biography
José Luis Alexanco, "Interrupted Solitude", at the Pamplona Encounters, 1972
José Luis Alexanco, "Interrupted Solitude", at the Pamplona Encounters, 1972
"On top of growing bored with it, I tired of making objects — objects that are bought and sold. So I began making the program whose result would appear on a television screen. Now you see the form on that screen, and you can direct the transformation yourself using a keyboard. Anyone can, by following the instructions. It is a film."
 
José Luis Alexanco, ca. 1973
José Luis Alexanco developed one of the most radical and visionary approaches to the intersection of image, technology, and language within the context of Spanish art in the second half of the 20th century. His practice connects traditional media such as drawing and painting with algorithmic methodologies and generative processes, sustaining an ongoing investigation into the formal possibilities of the sign, the body, and representation.
 
Between 1968 and 1973, he participated in the Centro de Cálculo at the University of Madrid, in collaboration with IBM, where he developed—together with mathematician José Barberá—one of the first computer programs for the automatic generation of plastic forms in Europe: MOUVNT. This software, now considered an early precedent of generative art, articulated the conceptual foundations that underpin his entire body of work: movement as a generative principle, the figure as a field of transformation, and deformation as an aesthetic, technical, and political horizon.
 
Parallel to his formal research, Alexanco was a driving force behind some of the most significant episodes in the history of Spanish avant-garde art. In 1971, together with composer Luis de Pablo, he created Soledad Interrumpida, a sound–visual performance that merged time, body, and space as sculptural material. The following year, they jointly organized the Encuentros de Pamplona (1972)—the largest experimental art event held in Spain under Franco’s regime—which transformed the city into a laboratory of collective experimentation, bringing together more than 350 artists from four continents.
 
His work with algorithmic systems never replaced his engagement with traditional media but rather expanded and complicated it. From the 1970s onwards, his attention increasingly shifted towards writing, alphabets, and graphic systems as structures of visual coding, maintaining a continuous dialogue between drawing, painting, and the construction of the sign.
 
In 1978, within the context of Spain’s democratic transition, Alexanco designed an experimental typeface for the facsimile edition of the Spanish Constitution, published that same year. This geometric, modular alphabet was directly derived from the processes he had developed at the Centro de Cálculo. The typeface synthesizes his research into deformation, visual coding, and sign construction—applied here to a juridical and symbolically foundational text. By employing a visual system based on fragmentation, grid structures, and generative geometry, Alexanco introduced a critical reflection on language, normativity, and representation: the questions that previously operated on the form of the figure or the body were now transposed onto the field of linguistic signification and, by extension, onto the juridical apparatus of the Constitution itself.
 
This operation turned the constitutional text into a surface where the normative and the visual are placed in constant tension. The alphabet functions as an autonomous visual code, with each letter derived from minimal variations within a self-imposed geometric system. From a contemporary critical perspective, this edition can be read as a way of highlighting the limits, tensions, and ambiguities of that historical moment: a new language for a new order, yet still built upon inherited and deeply controlled structures.
 
His work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); LACMA, Los Angeles (2022); The Kitchen, New York (1980); SculptureCenter, New York (1981); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015, 2021); MACBA, Barcelona (2018, 2022); Artium Museoa, Vitoria (2021); and the National Museum of Art, Damascus (2009), among others.
 
His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MACBA, Barcelona; Artium Museoa, Vitoria; the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; and the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, among others.
Exhibitions