ALBERTO VALDÉS ( 1918–1998 )

Alberto Valdés synthesized modes of expression from both the ancient and modern worlds in an unassuming but truly distinctive way. As a painter, he was adept in the use of old styles or features of art belonging to a historical epoch long beyond living memory.

Valdés was equally skilled in using styles from the era in which he lived and worked during the latter half of the 20th Century. Through the innovation of Alberto Valdés these periods can exist together.

Over the span of nearly four decades, Valdés created a diverse volume of paintings and drawings. His talent was spent working in solitude, without the critique of his contemporaries or the larger artworld to praise or disparage his creations. The celebration of Valdés’ art has largely come posthumously. A collection of Valdés’ charcoal drawings has recently surfaced and is presented in this catalogue, allowing for further speculation about the artist’s life and creative process. They indicate a seriousness and a formal sensibility consistent with his paintings.

Valdés was attracted to the ethos of European Modernism, Pre-Columbian art, the Italian

Baroque, and even African art. Although these modes of expression may seem unrelated on the surface, Valdés had a gift of seeing their connection and then combining them. Fortunately, he was not a formally trained artist. Often, formal art training presents the history of art in neat and compartmentalized periods. Valdés never saw it like that. He spent years working as a commercial artist in the movie industry, an industry known to amalgamate themes and narratives from our collective history. This non-traditional perspective served Alberto well throughout his lifetime of creative introspection.

Alberto’s life experience very much influenced his art and his world view. He would commonly say, “my life is my art — my art is my life”. This expression is an acknowledgement that you cannot separate the man from his art. More specifically, you cannot separate the events of Alberto’s life from his overall creative enterprise.

The Valdés family was part of a large population shift from Mexico to Southern California during the first part of the 20th Century. And like many immigrant families from that era, they honorably sent their sons to war. During the Second World War, Alberto was enlisted in the Army with tours in both Italy and France. It was in France that Alberto first encountered early European Modernism. Seeing works of art from Kandinsky, Klee, and Picasso had a profound impact on Alberto’s future art because those artists also looked to past epochs of human creativity for their inspiration.

While stationed in Italy, the young Valdés experienced vestiges from Italian masters all around him. Modern Italian culture has a unique way of existing side by side with its past. This would help confirm Valdés’ world view that time may not be linear and our history could be cyclical. Now Valdés had even more reason to call upon the masters of the past for guidance. The Italian painter Caravaggio for example, employed a dramatic use of contrasting light and dark tones, or chiaroscuro, that came to be known as tenebrism. The defining feature of this suite of drawings is that Valdés becomes, for the first time, a “Tenebrist”. The drawings resonate with violent contrasts of light and dark where darkness becomes a dominating feature of the image to create heightened emotion. This body of work gives us deeper insight into the life and art of Alberto Valdés and allows for further speculation on his creative process.

Alberto Valdés was a purist. The physical act of creation through his personal pursuit of vision was the most rewarding part of the creative process for him. These drawings were developed by Valdés in the mid-1980s and his working method is closely tied to the subjects he explored. He often started off with a wandering line in ink with conjoining dots as anchors on a blank page of vellum. After many versions over a number of pages,

Valdés would then trace back to add tone with charcoal. This method of working creates a dialogue amongst the drawings where one idea flows to the next so that one drawing can influence another. It’s no coincidence that this working process is very common in commercial art studios. And there is no doubt that Valdés was able to adapt this working process for the aims of his own art.

This suite of drawings thoroughly explores the duality between beauty and ugliness, masculine and feminine, youth and old age, the Christian cross and the four directions. Opposites were fundamental to the thought of the Surrealists whom Alberto revered. Specifically, the Surrealists would have been very aware of Jung’s observation of the anima and the animus in individual personalities. The anima being the feminine part of a masculine personality and the animus being the masculine part of a feminine personality. The merging of masculine and feminine, or androgyne, is a recurring theme throughout these drawings. In ancient times, androgyne was considered to be the ultimate outcome of the human psyche. Plato discussed androgyne as the unification of the feminine and masculine whereas the division of these primordial forces represent the fall of individuals as complete beings.

Although Valdés utilized his drawing ability as a vehicle of development for more complex works of art such as paintings on canvas, these drawings were conceived to stand on their own as finished works of art. Valdés was also an exceptional colorist taking cues from

Bauhaus master, Joseph Albers. However, these drawings skillfully replace the chromatic harmonies of his paintings with the contrasting tonality of tenebrism. The replacement of color for tone for this specific body of work can be seen as another expressive act of duality in Valdés’ work.

To understand the life and art of Alberto Valdés one must journey through history. This is the true gift of Valdés’ art. He is both a late 20th Century High Modernist and an Archaist channeling creative wisdom from the past. Although he embraced his Chicano heritage, Valdés' vision stands apart from most of his contemporaries who sought a more social-political mode of expression.

The Chicano Art Movement challenged social norms and stereotypes to help establish cultural autonomy for the people of Mexican descent living in America. And while Valdés’ art also focuses on the awareness of collective history and culture, his perspective acts as a window to the collective unconscious rather than a specific totem of cultural identity. In this way, Valdés was truly an outsider working from within. Through the legacy of his art, Valdés firmly takes his seat in the canon of Art History, offering a new perspective on artists of his era and his region.