Manolo Valdés: Recent Work – Paintings & Sculptures by Marlborough Fine Art

MANOLO VALDÉS RECENT WORK – PAINTINGS & SCULPTURES

Cover: Butterflies, 2016, Wood and steel 34 x 32 x 14 in. / 86.4 x 81 x 35.6 cm

MANOLO VALDÉS

MANOLO VALDÉS RECENT WORK – PAINTINGS & SCULPTURES

10 JUNE – 16 JULY 2016

Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY + 44 (0)20 7629 5161 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com

VALDÉS: IMAGE ALCHEMY

ne might reasonably claim that, among Spanish artists today, the work of Manolo Valdés shows the widest familiarity with the world’s art and its history. In his oeuvre one finds references to subjects as diverse as those horses in Chinese sculpture, as well as iconic images from European art, and specific references to works by Cranach, Matisse, Klee and some of the leading figures of Pop Art. There are even allusions to advertising subjects from American daily life, from the bags used at The Metropolitan Museum to the famous cartoon figure, Mickey Mouse.

Within the broad range of imagery upon which Valdés draws, he proposes alliances between civilizations in the same spirit as Sir Kenneth Clark used the term in his famous 1969 television series, Civilization. Clark suggested that the study of civilization rose above the mere study of anthropology; “Civilized man… must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time, that he consciously looks forward and looks back…”. Indeed, in his work Valdés continually re-evaluates the past while working on his next project. From a mosaic of hundreds of fragments, he creates a new image from the juxtaposition of quotations from different cultures and epochs. Deploying his understanding of history and a special gift for irony, Valdés transforms his mosaic of imagery into works with contemporary resonance. In this exhibition there are eleven paintings composed of oil and burlap, and fourteen sculptures built from wood and stone, alabaster or metal rods, all of which have been completed within the last two years. Through his choice of fragments and specific details Valdés seems to want to create a new aesthetic landscape with his work, one composed of a myriad of different references. This is achieved by paraphrasing one image into another, a kind of variation on the art of translation. Each work addresses and, at the same time, illustrates his enquiry into certain aspects of The History of Art. Out of this enquiry, the artist fabricates a unique mosaic of his visual experiences, driven by the repeated urge to review, reflect, and refract images of man, the only living creature able to leave behind evidence of his existence.

In this exhibition, his most recent works use highly diverse techniques, from those sculptures made essentially from bronze, to the unique wooden stones in Head. In addition there is the use of aluminum in Ferns II, the combination of wood with iron in Butterflies or Ivy, alabaster with metal in Ferns or Vibrations and pieces of steel with industrial paint in Blue Ferns II. More recent pieces, such as El dibujo como pretexto, are composed like drawings in air and created only out of metal rods. Many of these sculptures are based on the interrelation between head and hat, shifting the focus from the pedestal to the hat or headdress. This approach is often to be seen in the work of Paul Klee, and here, for example, Valdés’ dynamic combination of iron and glass in Blue, red and green makes reference to to Klee’s paintings. These materials were originally elements from glazed windows, which the artist has repurposed, just as Picasso repurposed newspapers in some of his Cubist works. Many of these headdresses have been created from corrugated cardboard before being cast in bronze, and many of the hats are from the remains of recycled material, transformed from their bald functionality into expressive potency.

PARAPHRASE AND TRANSLATION As suggested above, the act of paraphrasing goes beyond simply referencing and appropriating, requiring a dedicated creative input from the artist. Valdés revises and revisits The History of Art as well as reflecting on it in both senses of the word –

KOSME DE BARAÑANO

reconsidering it and mirroring it, allowing it to gaze at its own reflection. These transformations that Valdés’ image demands of its original constitute, in fact, a translation into another language. The artist himself comments on the meaning of this series of work, which arose from his reflecting on a single original source: “How can I change the rules of a painting by Matisse in order to convert it into something else? How can I paint it in another way, both the same and yet something that its creator would never have made?” The transformation that Valdés achieves comes about by changing the syntax, or changing the rules that, in turn, imply a change of the very morphology (of scale or dimension) and above all a change of the meaning of the original. How can one image emerge out of another? Is the image an open text or a hollow structure? Is Valdés to be an artist who destroys the image or one who bestows new meaning on it? The work of Valdés crosses time in a manner explored in the writing of recently deceased Italian philosopher, Umberto Eco. First, it focuses on semiotics, in the same way as Valdés – as a member of the Equipo Crónica in Valencia – did by manipulating the works of great Spanish masters such as Velásquez, El Greco, Goya and Picasso in the mid-‘60s. Valdés creates a style of painting as a critic, analyzing the history of images by assuming that within all great works of art one can find echoes of the sources and connections common to our shared visual language. It is for this reason that all works of art may be seen as symbolic, since a symbol embodies, at heart, a plurality of meanings. The title of the books of Umberto Eco, Opera aperta (1962), La struttura assente (1968), as well as Apocalittici e integrati (1964), could also be titles of Valdés’ paintings. Eco, who wrote extensively on the nature of translation, has pointed out that the meaning of a word is not simply that which is found in a dictionary but one whose proper meaning is revealed by its situation in context. Can the translator improve on the original? Does such a thing as ‘literal translation’ exist? These are the questions that Eco asks, illustrated with examples from universally famous literary texts. Valdés’

similar appropriation applies the same questions to The History of Art. Like Eco, Valdés deals with the subject of transposition and translation, not from the point of view of psychology or historical analysis, but from that of the philology of language – examining style and exploring semiotics.

BURLAP AND COLOUR The paintings that Valdés has created on burlap – using stitching onto different cloths, thick chromatic impasto, and high quality pigments – resemble entangled roots similar to vines that, from a distance, take on the form of one single image. This image may be difficult to grasp in its entirety, owing to its very thicket of cloths, tears, and dense colour and texture. When the eye seeks to encompass it, the image dissolves among the tears of the fabric, disappearing and denying its coherence. One gets the feeling of having come across a dense colourful substance which is constantly undergoing change, navigating between moments of clarity and of dissolution. What is ever present owes little to a clear narrative, but rather more to a confusion of assembly and destruction, in which figures and references proliferate. Valdés fragments, deconstructs and rebuilds at one and the same time, without it even being clear in which order these things happen. The same is true of his portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Everything becomes a mass of fragments that, in his hands, are eventually converted once more into a single image. In the baroque jumble of deconstructed elements which go to make up Valdés’ works, he does not so much conceal his use of different techniques and materials as offer, through them, proof of deliberate design. Observing the form of his compositions – with those outlines drawn on the canvas which are then obscured by his application of colour – the painted image takes shape from an accumulation of layers with the addition of sewn-on patches: whereas, in contrast, the image in his sculpture emerges from the crossfertilisation of different sources, on occasion drawing on a historical figure such as Cranach or Matisse. Nevertheless, what

VALDÉS: IMAGE ALCHEMY

then emerges and comes to life, in a different dimension and different language, is something other: it is Valdés’ own version. And the texture that he achieves comes from opposing procedures – one accidental, the other deliberate and by means of a new technique: sewing. Valdés’ painting can lay claim to its own freely established identity because of the range of ideas that constitute his source material. The paintings themselves possess a tactile dimension, which speaks to the viewer’s sense of touch. It goes beyond mere scale, such as one experiences with Chillida’s sculpture, and offers a fountain of knowledge from the many layers of the artist’s canvas. This combining of channels of expression opens up a third dimension to his work without abandoning those characteristics proper to visual stimulation. Details still contribute to the whole impression, and the artist’s use paraphrasing substitutes for the role of memory.

DISTORTING THE IMAGE Valdés uses evocation in the same way. He doesn’t just recall other works – he creates a narrative from a different angle, by distorting the image. In this sense, the narrative structure of his language shows affinities with the imaginative world of recent Latin American writing, an era which coincides with that of Valdés himself. I am thinking of the story entitled Los cachorros by Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, first published in 1965. Vargas Llosa narrates the life of ‘Pichula’ Cuéllar, a Peruvian boy who is left castrated after an attack by a dog. The life of the youth is recounted by means of different voices, from the distance taken by his friends, and also from other narrators. In Valdés’ work the ideas at the heart of The History of Art are addressed from different angles, distorted in different ways, starting from the nature of the material itself, wood or cloth, on which they are drawn and from which they are derived. Valdés’ reproduction of a woman’s head by Matisse – based as it is on a portrait of one of the master’s models, but now removed from its proper context and converted into a solitary icon

in paint or alabaster – cuts the image loose from its original meaning. It stops being what it was and is materially transformed into something else. The process resembles a linguistic device. The icon loses its original meaning and is left to the mercy of whatever new reality Valdés’ treatment will bestow – that is to say, to a figurative distortion that allows the chosen detail to become the whole composition, clearly sourced from a familiar work but now having a life of its own. Valdés’ work is characterised, however, by his own recognizable idiom, driven by his choice of visual references and by his unique morphology based on surface textures. This idiom is created not just by his use of particular materials but also by his method of combining them. In his sculptures Valdés uses elements of welding, rubbers and so on, to convey meaning over and above the technique used, in the same way that he uses sewing in his paintings. This follows the tradition of Julio González and the way in which he used welding, also not just as technique but as a channel for expression as well. Valdés’ craft skills aim for perfection even when the work created gives the impression of being broken up. The fundamental root of his style is to be found in the way in which he gives the impression of disturbing the work’s structure, of breaking up the form, of literally de-constructing. He creates work by cutting up and putting back together, evident as much in his wood sculptures where the broken pieces of wood are transformed into polished marquetry, as in his work in aluminum or iron where the treatment of the fragments of metal is such that it enables the sculpture to acquire the smooth surface texture of inlay, fully able to reflect the light that falls on it.

THE DIRECT GAZE Valdés’ gaze is direct, as is the case for all those artists of the avant-garde. The gaze of the mask is always direct, despite it being the gaze of one who is deliberately hiding or one who is simply different from the face of the mask. The gaze is direct but at the same time concealed. Is the gaze of 20th

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century art that of the Other? Or is it a gaze that hides behind something else, when in reality it has no right to do so? In any case, the origin, beginnings, or first steps in avant-garde art and its encounter with African art go hand in hand. The history of the avant-garde and the Western world’s construction of a history of African art begin at the same time, and so it is natural that the latter’s art has influenced the former. In recent years, so-called primitive art has provided visual answers (or visual considerations), artistic hopes, new aesthetic theories and a cultural debate, not unrelated to the history of contemporary art. The discovery of African art in the Western world’s writing of its History of Art created a cultural ‘big-bang’ that included art of other peoples (labelled ‘primitive art’ at that time) as well as Paleolithic cave drawings, such as those of Altamira or Lascaux, the re-valuing of the drawings of children and of the insane, and also the diverse genres of folk art. All these different fields contributed to the establishment of ethnography and anthropology within the setting of universities, academia and museums. The avant-garde movement cannot escape the interest aroused by these new fields, just as it cannot escape the new technologies, such as the fresh perspectives brought by the invention of airplanes, the experience of speed in motorized transport, as well as the spatial vision of present day mathematics. All of these have had distinct cultural repercussions and demand a renewal that is both moral and aesthetic. In the case of this Valdés exhibition, the direct gaze that African art has brought to 20th century sculpture collides with the composition of structure in Matisse’s portraits. In Valdés’ hands (and with his visual thinking) this is transformed into monuments, into totems of majestic presence.

LATER STYLE In 2014 Valdés changed his iconic style of sculpture completely, moving away from those works with a strong physical presence and their associated rich historical links. Instead, here he pursues the

idea of sculpture made up of wires, woven with his own hands, with Franciscan humility; simple, light drawings with powerful shadows, sculpture written in space. These pieces are entitled El dibujo como pretexto. These works take us immediately back in time, like Proust’s recall on tasting the Madeleine cake, to a memory from The History of Art: to the drawings of Alberto Giacometti. They take us back to those calligraphic strokes so wildly overlayered that they end up completely buried. Giacometti’s technique, his handling of the pencil, can be traced back to the drawings of the 16th century Mannerist Pontormo, whose graphic style was new and surprising for his time; a frenzy of strokes that obliterated details, eyes like empty sockets, elongated limbs, distorted and unnatural poses, and unfamiliar proportions of objects and figures. Essentially, those drawings revealed a desire to deform in a quest for something unique. The lines traced by Pontormo or Giacometti do not represent a scene or motif. It is as if they are not an image created by X-rays, but are the penetrating rays themselves. Valdés does not copy Giacometti’s drawing style, but develops his own artistic idiom at his own pace – both mentally and physically – to suit his creative impulse. Like the pianist who not only must demonstrate his technical command in performing a composer’s work with precision, but who must also convey his own spiritual sensitivity by penetrating and revealing the very sound-world, the innermost character of the music’s creator. I consider Valdés’ new style as an important change of register for him, which might even be called his ‘late style’, to use the term in the spirit of Edward Saïd’s illuminating essay on this subject. There is a problem currently with the appreciation of artists that was not the case in previous centuries. Nobody used to call upon Beethoven, when he was in the last years of his life, to play his very first symphonies. When Beethoven wrote those late string quartets, possibly greater masterpieces of musical complexity even than his symphonies, the public thanked him. They wanted him to

VALDÉS: IMAGE ALCHEMY

continue breaking new ground and expanding the language of music, because it was believed that the new work would be more profound, exceptional and even more succinct. Becoming old was a stage of life treated with great respect. For artists today changing course or exploring new departures from their familiar, established style is seen as as a luxury or even a contradiction, so it is expected that artists should repeat themselves. They are asked for a formula and then expected to reproduce it. Few dare to negociate a slow decline of their career in full public view. But great artists are not content just to continue in the same vein, on the strength of a brief moment of ephemeral success; Picasso wasn’t, nor was Matisse. They do not recycle their work, but rather continue developing in new directions, broadening the horizons of the landscape of their imagination. In Valdés new sculptures everything seems anatomically ill-defined, since their outlines remain vague, imprecise, yet their almost abstract features point towards a configuration virtually devoid of mass or volume. What the presence of the brush stroke seeks instead is the flow of a kind of energy.

THE ALCHEMY OF THE INDIVIDUAL VOICE Valdés is not an artist intimidated by paint nor, would it seem, was Giotto in the 14th century when compared to Duccio. He works on large canvases like one who sculpts. Fundamentally, these canvases are not simply paintings, but resemble sculptures that emerge from the flat surface, and whose composition is based on the solidity and frontality of the mask. Two aspects of African art interest Valdés: its freedom from literal depiction and its ability to incorporate the third dimension in its forms (as Picasso was attempting in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). By concentrating on the formal and structural aspects of the figure, rather than on reproducing the detail of superficial appearances, African artists showed that they had mastered the essence of abstract art well before the Europeans did. This is what Valdés perceived Matisse had done in his female portraits. As much in his painting as in his

sculpture, Valdés performs like a distinguished opera singer – like Plácido Domingo, in full mastery of all the registers with an assurance that comes from a long career and an extensive repertoire. His visual work, his voice or his singing, in terms of style, is fundamentally well balanced, as in all élite sports: a finely tuned voice, mastery of diction, phrasing, presence on stage, technique and delivery, and similarly balanced in the sensitivity and spontaneity with which he approaches his daily work. Sometimes imperfection too (as with Cézanne) leads him along new paths, which he is equally open to embrace. Valdés’ paintings have the quality that is demanded from the opera singer: a radiating voice, a voice that is shining, luminous and warm, both centred and well projected. His visual style is both homogeneous and capable of infinite nuances, using all registers (sculpture, painting, engravings) but as well as this, his voice is both a powerful force (in its tone, colour, body, strength and expanse) and a rich fount of expression (accessible, appropriate and effective). His work has a delightful quality of resonance (in the substance of its pigments) ideally adapted to aesthetic manifestations (of all of art history) and in particular to the pitch which attunes us to his work, allowing us to re-read this chronicle of history like a musical arrangement. His work is buttressed by his excellent technical ability, the fruit of a considerable body of work, and it expresses everything with a singular harmony. This sonorous individuality makes it possible to single Valdés out over his contemporaries. His distinct, resonating voice rings out and resounds in 21st century painting and sculpture. Professor Kosme de Barañano, Miguel Hernandez University, Altea and the Basque Country University, Bilbao

LIST OF WORKS

1. Head, 2016 Painted wood 36 x 36 x 25 in. / 91.4 x 91.4 x 63.5 cm

14. Retrato con Marco II, 2016 Oil on burlap 64 x 64 in. / 162.5 x 162.5 cm

2. Odalisca II, 2016 Oil on burlap 64 x 64 in. / 162.6 x 162.6 cm

15. Ivy, 2016 Wood and steel 29 x 27 x 13 in. / 74 x 68.6 x 33 cm

3. Ferns III, 2016 Alabaster and iron 28 x 42 x 8 in. / 71 x 106.7 x 20.3 cm

16. El dibujo como pretexto I, 2016 Iron 64 x 10 x 5 in. / 162.5 x 25.4 x 12.7 cm

4. Vibraciones, 2016 Alabaster and iron 29 x 31 x 9 in. / 73.6 x 78.7 x 23 cm

17. El dibujo como pretexto II, 2016 Iron 39 x 31 x 36 in. / 99 x 78.7 x 91.4 cm

5. Retrato en carmin y amarillo, 2016 Oil on burlap 65 x 47 in. / 165.1 x 119.3 cm

18. Ferns, 2016 Alabaster and steel 20 x 20 x 12 in. / 50.8 x 50.8 x 30.5 cm

6. Ivy, 2016 Alabaster and brass 33 x 34 x 25 in. / 83.8 x 86.4 x 63.5 cm

19. Blue Ferns, 2016 Painted wood and steel 29 x 27 x 26 in. / 73.6 x 68.6 x 66 cm

7. Blue, red and green, 2016 Wood, iron and glass 19 x 22 x 8 in. / 48.3 x 56 x 20 cm

20. Dama con Sombrero II, 2016 Oil on burlap 60 x 80 in. / 152.4 x 203 cm

8. Head, 2016 Painted wood 15 x 13 x 5 in. / 38 x 33 x 12.7 cm

21. Odalisca, 2016 Oil on burlap 64 x 64 in. / 162.5 x 162.5 cm

9. Dama con Sombrero I, 2016 Oil on burlap 65 x 55 in. / 165 x 139.7 cm

22. Retrato Con Marco I, 2016 Oil on burlap 64 x 64 in. / 162.5 x 162.5 cm

10. Cranach como Pretexto, 2016 Oil on burlap 59 x 90 in. / 149.8 x 228.6 cm

23. Retrato en Verde y Azul, 2016 Oil on burlap 64 x 64 in. / 162.6 x 162.6 cm

11. Retrato en verdes, 2016 Oil on burlap 65 x 47 in. / 165 x 119.4 cm

24. Butterflies, 2016 Wood and steel 34 x 32 x 14 in. / 86.4 x 81 x 35.6 cm

12. Blue Ferns II, 2016 Painted steel 21 x 17 x 13 in. / 53 x 43 x 33 cm

25. Ferns II, 2016 Aluminium 33 x 43 x 22 in. / 83.8 x 109 x 56 cm

13. Dama, 2016 Oil on burlap 64 x 64 in. / 162.5 x 162.5 cm

1. Head, 2016 Wood 36 x 36 x 25 in. / 91.4 x 91.4 x 63.5 cm