MANOLO VALDÉS

LE FORME DEL TEMPO

DESCRIPTION

Manolo Valdés, an internationally-­acclaimed Spanish artist, returns to Rome after an absence of twenty-­five years (since Galleria Il Gabbiano, 1995) with an extensive solo exhibition in the Palazzo Cipolla Museum’s magnificent halls.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Professor Emmanuele Francesco Maria Emanuele, Chairman of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale. It is being staged by POEMA, in collaboration with the Galleria Contini of Venice and with organizational support from Comediarting and Arthemisia. Gabriele Simongini is the exhibition curator.

Seventy-­odd works from the author’s atelier and major private collections, spanning both painting and sculpture (in wood, marble bronze, alabaster, brass, steel, and iron), including large-­size ones, illustrate Valdés’ creative trajectory from the early 1980s, the period shortly after the Equipo Crónica group disbanded, to today.

In Valdés’s figurative, playfully visionary research, artists from the more-­or-­less distant past – Velázquez, Rubens, Zurbarán, El Greco, Ribera; Léger, Matisse, Lichtenstein, etc. – become interlocutors with whom the artist enters into quotidian contact, paying homage while they amplify the polyphonic space occupied by his work.

It is as if the images Valdés plucks from the more-­or-­less recent past is transformed by incorporating changes brought in by later art, most notably via Informal and Pop Art, until they land in a new guise, this long journey through time having left their matter with holes and lacerations.