MANOLO VALDES

(Valencia, 1942) Spanish painter and sculptor. Manolo Valdés Blasco was born on March 8, 1942, in the city of Valencia. In 1957, after completing his studies, he entered the San Carlos School of Fine Arts, which he left just two years later to dedicate himself entirely to painting.

 

Even in his earliest works, the young Valdés demonstrated an extraordinary creative capacity and technical-formal skill. In 1962, he presented a group of works in this style at the Nebli Gallery in Madrid, which marked his first solo exhibition.

 

Likewise, in the early 1960s, Valdés, along with other artists, formed the Estampa Popular group in Valencia. This was at a time when the country, albeit tentatively, was opening up to a market economy. For them, new artistic expressions, in addition to reflecting this emerging socioeconomic situation, had to take into account the language and visual resources of mass media.

 

Throughout the 1980s, Valdés incorporated a new approach to painting that gradually distanced him from the methods he inherited from his time with Equipo Crónica. Although he continued to draw inspiration from the great works of art history, narrative elements and a taste for irony and the anecdotal gradually disappeared in favor of an increasingly dense and essential style of painting.

 

Through this rediscovery of texture and materiality, and without ever abandoning figuration, his work technically approached that of informalist painters such as Manolo Millares , Antoni Tàpies , Alberto Burri, and Jean Dubuffet . Likewise, during those same years, sculpture also began to play an increasingly important role in his production. Although wood would become the material he worked with most extensively, he did not shy away from exploring the tactile and formal qualities of lead, zinc, granite, alabaster, and other materials.