Ignacio
Valdes

Temps et Instant
Villa Ange Volant, Paris
September 2020 – July 2021
L'Ange Volant, Villa Gio Ponti

Do shadows have colour? According to the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, without a doubt. We have to think that Ignacio Valdes shares this opinion, as his silhouettes, without thickness, almost transparent, seem to emerge from pastel coloured clouds, even though the canvases are executed in oil. Still as shadows these open forms that blur and fuse, avoid the contour that circumscribes, the line that encircles. With an aura of silence and mystery, they indicate more than they show, suggest more than they narrate.

And yet, the gaze seeks to uncover content within these light sketches that evaporate before their recital, in these representations that slide towards the vaporous. An understandable effort, because Valdes evidently does not practice abstraction, but an interlude rich in possibilities, preserved by an immaterial testimony of the real. The artist has the rare gift of inventing unknown and suggestive forms, condensed expressions of a personal poetry.

Placed on a backdrop made up of zones of patched colour, which advance or retreat, they form a field of uncertainty where the authority of the gaze gives way to the trial and error of the eye. Scattered fragments which rise in the middle of an indefinite space, without a horizon, they are like reflections of wandering clouds whose configuration changes at every moment.

In the final instance, if the work revendicates anything, it is its fragility.

© Itzhak Goldberg
Paris, September 2020