'Recent Paintings' by Scott Bauer
Ignacio Valdes, Recent Paintings
Ransom Gallery, London, 2007
by Scott Bauer
Given that critics have been penning obituaries to painting for decades, it’s refreshing to encounter the art of Ignacio Valdes, a painter keen to harness the textural and chromatic potential of the medium. Here is an artist who clearly revels in the tactile and sensual possibilities presented when pigment is applied to canvas.
Valdes seems to work intuitively with paint, allowing the medium to have its say in a dialogue that gives primacy to the process, rather than any preconceived ideal. In this way and in the scale of the largest works, Valdes owes a debt to Abstract Expressionism. But the figural and anthropomorphic forms that emerge out of these surfaces speak of a more immediate world. At times these forms are playful, almost comic, dwarfed by vast tracts of saturated colour: bodies float in space, hovering over others, disengaged pairs of legs march along resembling musical notations, a figure races through space on some undisclosed errand trailed by a shadow made of paint dragged along, literally, with brushstrokes. At other times Valdes’ forms have a seriousness, even gravitas, that is unmistakable: a shape like an animal haunch hovers on a saturated red ground or, in one of the largest canvases, masses of yellow, orange and black bleed into one another and mingle like storm clouds in some Sublime nineteenth-century landscape painting. These competing shapes and moods sometimes coexist in the same canvases, and it’s this dichotomy of scale and tone that creates real visual tension. The message in these discordant pairings is open to any number of interpretations. Still, I hesitate to read too deeply for meaning into paintings where the surfaces are so hypnotically rich.
Art-historical allusions abound in Valdes’ canvases: Goya’s still life paintings of butcher shops, Bosch’s imaginings of heaven and hell and Bacon’s attenuated and manipulated models all seem to reverberate through this body of paintings. These are never direct visual quotations; they’re relationships and evocations that stem from an erudite and thorough understanding of the history of art. This is also true of Valdes’ relationship to abstraction. There might be echoes of de Kooning or Motherwell in these canvases, but the visual language is always thoroughly translated into a uniquely new dialect.
© SCOTT BAUER, Mark Ransom Gallery, London, October 2007
Ransom Gallery, London, 2007
by Scott Bauer
Given that critics have been penning obituaries to painting for decades, it’s refreshing to encounter the art of Ignacio Valdes, a painter keen to harness the textural and chromatic potential of the medium. Here is an artist who clearly revels in the tactile and sensual possibilities presented when pigment is applied to canvas.
Valdes seems to work intuitively with paint, allowing the medium to have its say in a dialogue that gives primacy to the process, rather than any preconceived ideal. In this way and in the scale of the largest works, Valdes owes a debt to Abstract Expressionism. But the figural and anthropomorphic forms that emerge out of these surfaces speak of a more immediate world. At times these forms are playful, almost comic, dwarfed by vast tracts of saturated colour: bodies float in space, hovering over others, disengaged pairs of legs march along resembling musical notations, a figure races through space on some undisclosed errand trailed by a shadow made of paint dragged along, literally, with brushstrokes. At other times Valdes’ forms have a seriousness, even gravitas, that is unmistakable: a shape like an animal haunch hovers on a saturated red ground or, in one of the largest canvases, masses of yellow, orange and black bleed into one another and mingle like storm clouds in some Sublime nineteenth-century landscape painting. These competing shapes and moods sometimes coexist in the same canvases, and it’s this dichotomy of scale and tone that creates real visual tension. The message in these discordant pairings is open to any number of interpretations. Still, I hesitate to read too deeply for meaning into paintings where the surfaces are so hypnotically rich.
Art-historical allusions abound in Valdes’ canvases: Goya’s still life paintings of butcher shops, Bosch’s imaginings of heaven and hell and Bacon’s attenuated and manipulated models all seem to reverberate through this body of paintings. These are never direct visual quotations; they’re relationships and evocations that stem from an erudite and thorough understanding of the history of art. This is also true of Valdes’ relationship to abstraction. There might be echoes of de Kooning or Motherwell in these canvases, but the visual language is always thoroughly translated into a uniquely new dialect.
© SCOTT BAUER, Mark Ransom Gallery, London, October 2007