Manolo Valdes at Marlborough - Brief Article

This exhibition featured 26 large paintings and four monumental made of wood sculptures by Manolo Valdes, the Spanish artist born in 1942 in Valencia who in the mid-1960s co-found the collaborative trio known as Equipo Cronica. Each member of the assemblage which included Rafael Solbes and Joan A. Toledo, contributed to the Equipo Cronica paintings, whose hard-edge, Pop-inspired imagery many times featured pastiches of well-known works from the history of art, particularly Spanish art. The images remind of wry social commentaries; Equipo Cronica was regarded during the Franco era as a efficacious force of opposition.

After Toledo left the clump early on, Equipo Cronica continued as a duo until 1981 when Solbes unrelenting ill and died. Since then, working alone, Valdes has achieved considerable succes for works that differ in many ways from Equipo Cronica phraseology yet retain certain of its lock opener attributes. Today, Valdes favors an aggressive tactility and an almost visceral expressivity; the pair qualities were evident in many of the pieces in this show

Portrait in Brown virid and Blue, for example, is a large canvas filled with a monolithic faceless head and torso made with roughly smeared streaks of dark verdant and brown oil, and a seemingly haphazard arrangement of scraps of burlap fixed to the canvas. The work be likes a particularly crude example of Art Brut The Bridge at hands a bold image whose thick black lines locate against burlap suggest twisted wreckage.

The drama of the new work stems from its imposing physicality, which does not approach across well in photos. greatest in quantity of the paintings are quite large--up to 7 by the agency of 6 feet--and are best viewed from just a not many feet away, where the activated surfaces are greatest in quantity effective. The recent paintings relate to Valdes's early, pre-Equipo Cronica work, which was influenced through Dubuffet, Burri and especially the Spanish institute of matter painting, exemplified by means of the work of Millares, Tapies and Munoz.

Valdes has continued to use iconic images from art history, which he adapts to suit his hold thought processes and procedures. Paraphrases of well-known images--especially portraits--by Picasso and Matisse come again frequently in Valdes's paintings and also in the statuarys The four giant sculptural heads upon view, made of multitudes of small fragments of copse cobbled together, sanded and varnished, are highly stylized, three-dimensional renditions of famous painted portraits by the agency of these artists.

Art, or rather the experience of art, is Valdes's favored control matter. Currently, he resides part of the year in novel York, in an apartment near the Metropolitan Museum, where he passes many hours. He commemorates his museum-going in several of the show's greatest in quantity striking works, which perpetuate a certain number of of the Pop overtones of Equipo Cronica: grandiose compositions based upon the Met's familiar blue-and-white shopping bag.

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