Virtual Exhibition

Romà Vallès

Visual autobiography of an absence

... all art tends towards an absence of limits in limited conditions of creation.

Gao Xinjian

Seated placidly facing the two most recent and only self-portraits by Romà Vallès, I am trying to understand his experience to see if it fits my choice: starting with some works that synthesize his artistic career and his life, because far from the topic that the genre could evoke, in this case the self-portrait and his approach take a 180° about-turn. As I observe, words come to mind and the space and the painting merge, the textures help us to gain access not only to the matter but also to the richness of an alive world. And the...

Autoretrat I
2011
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

The absence of a biography converts these two works of art into a plastic and visual autobiography, and the gaze needs the touch to delve into the qualities of the colour or in the furrows of a shadow that escapes between the images. Visual self-portrait and absence of biography – one that no one has written, he tells me – create a framework of fragments, connections whereby the most abstract background is condensed with the lived trace. The absence of a written biography provokes this need in him to outline certain circumstances linked to the flow of life, a kind of collage of life and memory, of transformation of memory into an emotional intensity.

Autoretrat II
2011
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

One of these self-portraits relates to the women who have been important to him and made him what he is, who become part of different aspects of his memory: his mother, wife, daughter and granddaughter surround him in an enlarged, painted and unpublished self-portrait from 1951.

Mundo roto
1965- 1966
Painting
Mixed media on wood

When I introduced figuration in the sixties with a bloody irony, with fragments from magazines and newspapers that juxtaposed with the painting, with themes such as eroticism, misery, violent death…, people didn’t understand why I had moved on to collage. Instead of understanding that it was a way of denouncing situations of injustice, some conservative-minded critics made fun of the physical evidence, of the process of the work itself, saying that, “This broken world is very broken!”. In contrast, J. E. Cirlot did understand that I was condemning the “human condition”.

Mundo roto
1965
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

Mundo roto III
1965
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

Mundo roto IV
1965
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

Mundo roto
1965
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

Homenatge a Durero
2011
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

"The essence of things does not have a chronology, you can find it in the grand masters of painting, but you need maturity to acknowledge it. We go through life and half of it passes us by without even realizing that the burden is stronger from a historical perspective. Actions are repeated and there is a thread that unites, that warns us that there is not so much difference."

Homenatge a Leonardo
2011
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

Homenatge a Man Ray
2010
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

These re-readings of the art world, combined with the reflective and intimate process of his own journey through life, are introduced in homages to painting, even integrating religious themes for the first time, images that are considered to be impressive and brutal in Spanish painting. And among El Greco, Miró, Picasso and J. M. de Sucre, so do Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer and Man Ray appear.

Homenatge a Miquel Àngel
2011
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

Homenatge a Miró
2011
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

Homenatge a Picasso
2010
Painting
Mixed media on canvas

"In 1966, collage was very useful as a political protest against badly understood bourgeois life. I did it with a certain irony and evolution has led me to these homages that allow me to – as I never had – make links with other periods. Now it is not so critical, although some may interpret it as such, but in fact I create a positive complicity with the great painting in history and I try not to nullify anything. Everything that was attack, aggression, irony… is now understanding and admiration."

Heràclit. Collage
2008
Painting
Mixed media on wood

The final series in painting and collage, “Heràclit”, is like reading Umberto Eco and making a parallel structure, bringing history to our present and discovering that, while the times, scenes and their protagonists may change, there is a background that lasts, because hindsight enables us to stretch an invisible thread that unites, in a transcendent way, the different approaches of human beings.

Heràclit. Collage
2008
Painting
Mixed media on wood

Heràclit. Collage
2008
Painting
Mixed media on wood

The final series in painting and collage, “Heràclit”, is like reading Umberto Eco and making a parallel structure, bringing history to our present and discovering that, while the times, scenes and their protagonists may change, there is a background that lasts, because hindsight enables us to stretch an invisible thread that unites, in a transcendent way, the different approaches of human beings.

Biography
Romà Vallès

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