Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, 2009

TOOTING BEC LIDO: Paintings from 1980 - present
National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile, 2009

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in harness with the A.M.S. Marlborough Gallery, welcomes the Chilean contemporary painter, IGNACIO VALDES, back to Santiago for a comprehensive exhibition of paintings, works on paper and sculpture. This Retrospective is to run from 28th May to 12th July 2009.
Ignacio Valdes has made his main home in London since spending one year as a post-graduate painter at the celebrated Slade School of Fine Art there from 1995 - 1996.

Since then, Valdes has made many cultural trips to Europe, as well as three or four return visits to Chile. In 1997 and 2001 the Marlborough Gallery in Santiago presented his recent paintings.
Although his visits have been short, perhaps a month or six weeks, returning to Chile provides a perspective with which the artist can evaluate the changes that have taken place in the work since the previous visit: a perspective of exhibition and inspiration. Not a time of working physically on new paintings and sculpture but a time to enjoy feedback, and to stand back and allow what seems to have most recently appeared in the work to make sense and point a way to solving problems, pictorial and sculptural, that may lay ahead.

Starting life as an artist in 1979, a sculptor at the School of Fine Art in Santiago, Ignacio Valdes returned to Chile after five years with a show of small bronzes. He was in Italy in 1980 and 1981. In 1984, after a period in Paris, he held a show of expressionist pictures here. In 1988 -1989 he was in New York. More than enough moving around to discover that mankind is the same in whatever corner of the earth he or she may be encountered.

The larger part of the decade 1985 -1995, however, Valdes was based here in Chile and this is where his three daughters were born: in 1989, 1991, and 1993.

This Retrospective Exhibition is on a grand scale: upwards of thirty or forty paintings and works on paper and sculpture, about one hundred works in total. It will provide an opportunity for a wider public to examine and assess the vision of one of the most inspiring Chilean artists of today. Painting on a large, but not oversized scale, many of the figures in the painting are just under life-size. They linger in the pictorial space, uncertain of their past, their future, their role in the present: sharply reminding the viewer of the tentative nature of reality and the sometimes dreadful quality of taking a position or making a decision. This experience of the viewer demonstrates one of the most subtle acts of subversion in Valdes’ repertoire, for these figures, in all their different positions and moods, are not portraits, nor are they self-portraits, but they are “us”. The figures represent man, or womankind. They bear no happy news nor need they be interpreted as figures of tragedy or sadness; rather, to me, they stand for the universal predicament of existing.

Form matters to Valdes, of course. And sometimes the form, without which these images cannot be represented, has to take on some remarkable disguises or costumes [quote here a painting resembling a fish, like hedgehog on holiday 6] in order to perform the purpose, pre-ordained by the artist, (ceaselessly checking and re-working so as to maintain the edgy balance between the particular and the general) of reflecting a state of mind or being which, in a continuous state of flux, can reflect back to us this predicament, the necessary horror of freedom, the awful consequences of responsibility, in the understanding of the need to love these things.

Colour also seems to fulfil a subversive purpose: rich, worked and deep, it encases the figure, or subject, in a luxurious, separate, state of being, allowing for an almost forensic examination of both the limitations that prevent us, and the options that allow us, to get through the day, ‘raging correctly’, or ‘engaging honestly’ with our outer personae, with the wider world that engages us and torments us at the same time. This back and forth, like the travels of Ignacio Valdes, brings greater meaning and intensity to his work the more we examine it.

© RICHARD SALMON
London, May 2009