Manolo Valdés: L'Arte come Pretesto, Venice

The scene is dominated by magnificent paintings, large-scale collages, and charming sculptures depicting women’s faces and equestrian subjects, which are reproduced in aluminium, bronze, iron, wood, alabaster and resin. The vivid and vibrant visual language, the study of raw materials, the personalized pictorial realism, and the use of multidimensional layers and large-scale canvases: are just a few of the traits that make the artist’s style instantly recognizable. As a starting point for his artistic process, Valdés reinterprets the most famous masterpieces in the history of Western art in a contemporary way, those created by the illustrious masters Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Matisse. The Las Meninas series are among the artist's most significant sculptures, inspired by Diego Velázquez's homonymous painting. . They feature a recurring personalized representation of the infant Margherita, which is taken out of context and transformed to be three-dimensional; the new version appears to be enriched with a vitality unknown to the original one, while it retains its intrinsic royalty at the same time. Valdés is an artist capable of showing the magnificence of Art: in fact, in his paintings and sculptures we can perceive how his passion for art drives him to create new expressive languages by testing unusual materials, pasty and bituminous colors, luminous details and raw materials that transform his canvases into multi-dimensional, textured and full-bodied objects.