Manolo Valdés: I Dettagli Luminosi, Venice

The new works, all of which created for the exhibition at Contini Art Gallery, depict beautiful, stylized figures in the artist’s well-known signature style. Valdés, famous for depictions of women in all media, has created some of the most communicative works of his storied career. Charming female heads in aluminum, bronze or alabaster, paintings and large-scale collages as Perfil II, which weds a late Matisse collage technique to Renaissance-style drawing. The blue bronze visage in Mariposas Azules is adorned with dozens of massive butterflies in a sculpture that is as uplifting as it is profound. The exhibition also includes sculptures from the Las Meninas series, which are based on the famous painting by Diego Velázquez. The recurring, “semiabstracted” Reina Mariana, is translated into three dimensions, rendered in bronze, and presented in isolation, containing references to its original context and yet possessing a life of its own. Velázquez, Rembrandt, Matisse, are his starting point for the creation of a work. Valdés acts as an image-hunter; he chooses a central theme and develops it in series, proposing different meanings and giving back a unique and contemporary image, but not devoid of its original value. He appropriates the most famous masterpieces of the past and then associates them with a contemporary realization: the vivid and vibrant visual language, the study of the matter, the pictorial realism, the use of multidimensional layers and large-scale works, are just some of the features that make his immediately recognizable style.