The Demiurge of Light

ESPAÑOL

(Translated by: Jose Ángel García Landa, 

                        Shardcore 

                        and Lilo Mor)

The beginning of his life is staged in Saragossa, in the year 1959. Just then and there, he was born apparently like any other human being, but shortly, in the early years, those lucky ones that could see him growing up noticed the energy that germinated from his little right hand. He grew up being aware of his talent, and his insatiable curiosity induced him to experiment with lines and shades constantly -lines and shades that were first taught by his father's hand. Day after day, little Dino becomes engrossed in drawing, and so he took refuge in a realm to which only he had access. Flirting with great works shown in dull museums, and improving his discipline, he started the labor that conquers his heart forever, being 16 years old. This labor is to shape the projects of his prodigious imagination with paint.

GAZES

Dino Valls is a painter that has captivated lots of critics and experts on art. He has been  interviewed several times and he has been the main figure in many articles of magazines, books, or even in the recent blogs that flood the Web. Journalists, writers, critics: among them Antón Castro, Armando Álvarez Bravo and Mario Antolín Paz.

Leafing through the artist's monographic book (Ex Picturis), we can read two essays that summarize with great accuracy all the work produced by Valls from the 80s, authored by Edward Lucie-Smith and Catherine Coleman. The first is a critic and a writer. He emphasizes the immortal essence of Valls's paintings based on the works left by history. This artist's paintings, made to last, are opposed to the momentary art that had its heyday from around the middle of the last century, the same that predicted and carried out a rebellion against the "rules" governing the art of earlier ages. Lucie-Smith holds that Dino Valls is regarded as the enemy of true spontaneity, that his technical process, minutely organised, is the very opposite of spontaneous. As to Catherine Coleman, she concludes that Valls can be defined as a classical artist, that he does not portray the unique and instantaneous moment of the exterior world, but he presents it [as something] idealized and stable in order to compare it with the constantly changing interior world. Coleman describes his work as a production that analyzes modern and postmodern content through figuration, employing traditional techniques of Flemish and Italian oil painting; techniques that the artist painstakingly investigates and then personalizes. His paintings do not explain, but make an appeal to the unknown and darkest side of human nature. Dino Valls does not “flee” from his reality; rather he tries to unravel the essence of everything. He tries to find answers that only are in our soul, where the origin of all things is to be found.

It is also very interesting to listen to the artist's own words and opinions. On one occasion, he was interviewed by Antón Castro, and there, the painter made manifest a number of views describing his own work as creations that explain present-day concerns. Although his paintings are fully created with traditional elements and methods,  their essence and conception go beyond an ancient world-pincture. Valls  reflects passages from the history of mankind, but he approaches the past from an acute consciousness of the present he inhabits. He says that he cannot "stop being contemporary". In addition, although we all are dumbfounded because of the realism and meticulousness of his works, Dino insists that it is not form which is his goal, but the ideas, the meaning: it is work at the service of reason or intellect. This urges us to understand him through a conceptual language. The American artist Sol LeWitt, talking about Conceptual Art in an article published in 1967 in the magazine Artforum, said something that is directly connected with this subject: When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.

Finally, the painter talks of ambiguity. It is evident that esotericism is fundamental in his personal and artistic education. Magic, philosophy and alchemy are very important in his paintings. Taking into account what Valls says about the ambiguity of ages, of sexes, and of historical periods, we can conclude that his learning was not only shaped at the Faculty of Medicine. Thus, what connects Valls to classical art is Beauty; and what he imposes, as a contemporary artist, is the heartbreaking emotion that is intensified with the characters’ wounds, wounds that we understand through a wide system of symbols.

SEASONS

Time is the element that has intrigued human beings the most all along their history. Science and art have tried alike to comprehend it, but getting to know it completely of just breaking the laws that rule it has turned out to be impossible. It seems to be the only law, the fairest law, the one nobody can break. We only can alter Time in our fantasies. It seems that very few artists, or none, have failed to reflect upon time. Dino Valls manipulates Time in each of his paintings and on each of his characters’ faces, from the  smoothness of a child's sking to the face marked with the wrinkles of old age.

Two paintings by Valls that show an explicit use of the notion of Time are Aetatis Suae -405- (1988) and the diptych Incipit-Explicit (1990). The former refers to the painted woman's age. “Aetatis suae” (her age) was the lettering that appeared on portraits centuries ago to indicate the subject's age. The irony is already in the title. We see someone that is 405 years old, which is something completely unconceivable from a natural approach to the palpable world. In addition, the character holds a sandglass that does not appear to obey gravity. The sand goes just in the opposite direction of the gravitational force. The girl, like a sorceress, has the power of transforming the visible and invisible frame of the world. Incipit-Explicit, on the other hand, displays the trajectory of a single day, and light is the clue. Apart from the rigorous details of the landscape on the background, which displays the evolution of a farm land throughout a laborious working day, it is the direction of light which confirms the movement of time. Incipit (here begins) receives the morning Orient sun's rays, and Explicit (here ends) shines with the last western sunbeams. 

[AETATIS SUAE -405- (1988)
Oil / canvas
73 x 60 cm.]

[INCIPIT / EXPLICIT (1990)
Diptych
Oil / panel
50 x 40 cm.]

Still immersed in the enigma of time, the following four sections are going to comment those elements of Valls's painting that are related to the past. Each heading evokes one of the four seasons of the year. Cold is going to tackle the Gothic stage; Flowering is going to pay attention to the Renaissance; Heat is going to look at the Baroque period; and finally, in the autumnal season, Contemplation will underline those things that give the painter his identity.

Cold

Gothic painting, together with its historical context, is an outstanding influence on Valls's work.  The beginning of this art could be found in the second half of the 12^th century and early in the 13^th. This painting was realistic, and it often dealt with Christian themes. Valls's archetypal characters inherit those Virgins’ and Saints’ features; therefore, we could assert that there is Gothic in each of his paintings. We see allusions to this stage in those backgrounds where he recreates lancet arches or when he places figures that evoke the religious icons, as in The Key (1985) or in Arbor Vitae (1994). We also could mention those backgrounds that have been treated with gold leaf, like in medieval paintings, where it was used to grant a divine aura to the figures. 

 

[ARBOR VITAE (1994)
Triptych
Oil / panel
160 x 126 cm.]

The Gothic age brings up the first steps to a deliberate mimesis of nature, a mimesis that  is going to reach the height of its magnificence almost three centuries later, in the Renaissance. However, even though Valls reproduces paintings that are tremendously realistic and credible, the realities they present is not a simple copies of the world: they are constructions of his ingenuity. Valls also takes from this epoch the use of a refined technique (tempera and oil on panel). He uses tempera and oil on canvas or panel; these two used sometimes separately, and sometimes joined. In Vitella (1994), we can see another example that takes us to the Gothic era, since the painter shows a manuscript that dazzles with its exquisite miniatures, like those Gothic manuscripts; but there is a novel element, as the parchment is the character's own skin.

[VITELLA (1994)
Casein tempera and oil / panel
66 x 52 cm.]

The use of multiple formats that complement each other, just like diptychs, triptychs or polyptychs is an allusion to this period too, and likewise, the detailed textures of beautiful cloths with their pleats and embroideries. The allegorical nature and the complex utilization of symbols, typical of Flemish painting, besides the careful labor of painting even the slightest details, are exercisses that characterize his work too.

In this medieval era, Europe also counted on a wisdom inherited from ancient Greek philosophers and wise men from the Orient. This wisdom was especially important for the development of future scientific methods. This occult knowledge that received the name of “alchemy” attracts the painter because it predicates a deep knowledge of nature, and therefore the power to alter it. But apart from that, we can see longing to explore even those things that are not tangible. His painting is of a faithful inquirer into the metaphysical matters inaugurated by the ancient presocratics. Zadkiel’s Rebis (1988) or the little monsters in The Vision of the Illuminator of Bestiaries (1984) are results of his cryptic language. 

[ZADKIEL (1988)
Oil / canvas
130 x 130 cm.]

[THE VISION OF THE ILLUMINATOR OF BESTIARIES (1984)
Oil / canvas
146 x 114 cm.]

In order to finish our aproach to this distant universe the artist leads us into, we have to mention the usage of Latin in most paintings’ titles. If the spectator has to have resource  to the title of an abstract painting in order to understand it, Dino Valls does not make it easier. Apart from using elements unfamiliar to most audiences, the language that names his works is no less hermetic. It is a Mutus Liber’s language, a language made of dead words. 

[MUTUS LIBER (1996)
Casein tempera and oil / panel
110 x 92 cm.]

Flowering

Dino Valls built his foundations studying the details of the past that combined myth and reality. He also joined together the philosophic approaches that arose to address the mysteries of life. If the Italian Renaissance was a return to the classical wisdom, Valls’s spirit investigated all those things related to this reviving of history and all that its development implied. A fusion of art and science clearly emanates from his paintings, as it did likewise in words from that period. Focusing on the 15^th and 16^th centuries, we travel to the origin of the Vallsian amalgam between Beauty and Wisdom. Moreover, his work is emphatically closer to Renaissance anthropocentrism than to Gothic theocentrism.

An aspect that brings this painter closer to this artistic movement is his training in Medicine. Thanks to this, Valls could access recondite passages of the human body and psyche, like Leonardo in his tireless exploration of the enigma of man. Dino Valls also looked for many solutions to his questions, and he learnt by painting human bodies with an infinity of contortions and with many parts related to each other in terms of measurements. The human body becomes an object of study and the center of any possible subject matter. Having acquired a command of anatomy, Valls starts to deform the body in works like Aracne (1998) or Cryptodydimus (1999). The former shows, with a disturbing beauty and perfection, the creation of just one body that merges four human trunks, resulting in eight legs. The second uses the medical language to justify the presence of an ambiguous being: a double body expresses an emotional duality.

[ARACNE (1998)
Oil / panel
110 x 140 cm.]

The most recent among Valls’s works pursue this evocation of the field of medicine, but maybe on a harsher note. We beging to feel on our skin the coldness of the surgeon’s instruments –Dissectio (2006)- and the doctor’s hand holds hard, in a threatening way –Viciens (2008). Danger is not only inside ourselves, but it is evident outside too. 

[DISSECTIO (2006)
Polyptych (6 pieces)
Oil and gold leaf / panel
55 x 135 cm.]

[VICIENS (2008)
Diptych
Oil / panel
(2x) 25 x 25 cm.]

Heat

After the Renaissance, in the 17th century, Italy spawned the Baroque movement, an art that soon afterwards is going to spread to the rest of Europe. Several of Valls's works hark back to the dominant aesthetics of that period. In Saint Anthony’s Temptations (1991), we do not only recall the triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch five centuries before. The character’s modest hood suggests the humbleness of Zurbarán’s saints. The rich coloring, the dynamism caused by steep diagonals or the state of mind that we see in Incubus (1992), The Ship of Fools (1992) and Passio (1993), respectively, also evoke the maxims of this art that tried to impress the viewer. Vortex (1998) is another painting that has that dramatic quality capable of moving us, and Vanitas (2004) is a lovely “skull” that comes to remind us of the imperious end. The progressive blurring of the outlines is one of the precepts of those times which can be detected in the painter’s work; and The Creation of Tzade-The Creation of Ayin (1992) displays a taste for theatricality exploring to the maximum the movement and emphasizing the frightened faces.  

[SAINT ANTHONY’S TEMPTATIONS (1991)
Egg tempera and oil / panel
61 x 49,5 cm.]

[VANITAS (2004)
Oil / panel
25 x 20 cm.]

[THE CREATION OF TZADE – THE CREATION OF AYÍN (1992)
Diptych
Egg tempera and oil / panel
140 x 49 cm.]

Baroque masters were renowned for their use of color and light. Sephirot (1992) invokes Rembrandt’s splendor with a powerful zenith light, but furthermore, the gentle light projected by the spectator reveals the painting in the background, that references this influence, The Anatomy Lesson painted by the Dutch master. 

[SEPHIROT (1992)
Egg tempera and oil / canvas / panel
140 x 78 cm.]

Contemplation

The periods discussed above are essential to the histoy of painting. From the modern art that follows, Valls adopts the poetic and oneiric language employed by symbolists and surrealists, and he playfully distorts our knowledge of the world. There are some paintings that remind us of René Magritte’s conceptual surrealism, and there are many others, the greater part of them, where we notice Paul Delvaux’s eroticism. The allusion to Magritte’s works is known intuitively when the artist merges the “real” space of the painting with the space that a character-painter paints in the painting itself, or when the mirror insists on showing a character’s secret feelings.

Other works by Valls are provocative in a way which instils in us an enduring love for his work. In De Profundis (1989), Self-Portrait (1991) and Tacere (1992) Valls “lies” like poets do. He gives life to the characters, or perhaps they take possession of it, like Pirandello’s “six”. The figure in the first one tries to destroy the painting and destroy himself at the same time. It is a suicidal action that is repeated in Tacere. In this image, the woman does not have De Profundis’s knife; but she, with a mere hand gesture, rebels against the painter erasing her own face. Self-Portrait, however, wants to live, and istead of breaking the space that surrounds her, she paints it herself.

[DE PROFUNDIS (1989)

Oil / canvas
92 x 73 cm.]

[TACERE (1992)
Egg tempera and oil / panel
43 x 35 cm.]

[SELF-PORTRAIT (1991)
Oil / panel
38 / 30 cm.]

Valls’s symbolism has much in common with medieval symbolism, but there is also a symbolism that is nearer to our reality, one that belongs to the artist’s contemporary view and that explores the hesitant and paranoid current moment. For example, there is an element that the painter starts to show in his works that belongs to our technologized society. It is the snapshot, developed in the mid 20th century. We can see it in works like Noxa or Rorschach (2006), and it is an element that is going to be useful to continue fathoming the study of the human body and behavior. 

[NOXA (2006)
Oil / panel
25 x 25 cm.]

Eros Wounded by Thanatos (1986) reminds us of the Symbolist period, especially because of its use of mythological figures. Love is marked by Death, which is a female pubis here. What is the message that he wants to transmit? Here we could speak about the Freudian psychoanalytic theories, which posit the existence of two impulses in nature. Two opposed impulses that are inseparable: the sexual or life impulse against the death impulse. Being participants of creation, we contribute to our destruction. That is the idea of fatal eroticism that lives in the painter’s created world.  

[EROS WOUNDED BY THANATOS (1986)
Oil / canvas
92 x 60 cm.]

“Vallsian” work is also characterized by an analysis of diverse states of mind felt by the human being. These conditions or feelings used to have a negative content, like dejection, grief, fear, sadness or distrust. The darkness that occupies the characters’ mind contrasts with the external beauty. Dino Valls’s paintings keep a painstaking balance between colors and shades, and they also have a perfect harmony between those components that horrify us and those that captivate our eyes. We do not only value the beauty of the flesh that is supported by a perfect skeleton, there is also a disembodied energy that comes from the figure’s souls. We guess unbalanced mental conditions, or the unconscious and the repressed desires that are revealed in our dreams. In Tomorrow Shall Be Never (1986) the artist uses the surrealist language to allude to the hidden sexual desire that these women feel. Id is buried by super-ego. Ethics and moral thoughts must guide our steps. 

[TOMORROW SHALL BE NEVER (1986)
Oil / canvas
100 x 81 cm.]

Valls, as an expert in the Platonic ontology, is going to center on those contents that are known by all people, independently of their race, culture or age. Plato asserted the existence of a world of universal ideas, common to all of us, and we access to it through the anamnesis of our immortal soul. Carl Gustav Jung is going to classify it as “the collective unconscious”.

CHAOS

Pollock’s paintings are blurred and messed up at first sight, but they have an internal order. In Dino Valls’s works we are going to see just the contrary. His works are tremendously organized. Precisely what we do not see with our eyes, what our unconscious grasps, is a chaotic inner world. His archetypical characters ultimately mean that the human being is the same since his origin. He is just as complex as before, and he has the same concerns and fears. With ambiguities, contradictions and indeterminate entities, Valls makes us feel confused. The painter forces us to meditate, to mess up our canons in order to make us to give order and meaning to his works.

Many Valls’s paintings have a postmodern character. They could be the object of multiple interpretations.  The artist, who has never intended to break with tradition, but to look at it from a new perspective, takes up old masterpieces again and he studies them to such an extent that he can distort them and play with them as much as he wants. The Impossible Kiss (1987), for example, shows us a Mona Lisa’s profile; and Per Rectum, Per Versum (1988) leaves us amazed, the painter takes up the Museo del Prado’s Las Meninas again, and he shows it from two new approaches. Dino Valls enters Diego Velázquez’s painting in order to compel us to see beyond what is on display. He teaches us not to be satisfied with the artist’s constructions, but to de-construct the works. Conceiving a painting that “talks” about itself is a postmodern method that we could call “metafiction”, as in literature. 

[THE IMPOSSIBLE KISS (1987)
Oil / canvas
73 x 60 cm.]

[PER RECTUM, PER VERSUM (1988)
Oil / canvas
130 x 97 cm.]

There are continuous allusions to the old masters' works, whether in the title (The Dream of Reason) or in figures which are relocated from past works, like Fernando Gallego’s Santa Catalina in Mystical Chord (1989). The painter does not pursue the absolute originality that avant-garde artists tried to find. He knows that it is completely impossible. His effort is based on an arduous exploration of all those things that attract him. 

[MYSTICAL CHORD (1989)
Oil / canvas
97 x 130 cm.]

Another postmodern character is the fact that his work is not openly positive. His way of painting is the only Utopian aspect of his art; but pessimism emerges in the meaning. Woman, who has appeared many times as men’s victim and as many times as a victim of herself, has a leading role here, not only because she had been traditionally idealized and then represented in countless times, but also because she turns out to be more complex and chaotic. Observing his works, I remember some literary works where woman appears as a target of study to the scientist. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” come to my mind. In the first story, a surgeon wants to remove his wife’s birthmark, and it does disappear, but the wife will die at the same time. In the second text, on the other hand, we see a doctor that locks his wife up in a room because of her supposed hysteria. The fact is going to derange her irremediably. 

[THE DREAM OF REASON (1997)
Egg tempera and oil / panel
80 x 57 cm.]

 

And thus Dino Valls speaks with his painting. He asserts that we have scarcely changed since mankind appeared on the Earth and evolved from its physical and intellectual origins. There have been some decisive changes along history, but not the necessary ones to live in a better external and internal world. Grief and uncertainty still live in our hearts and in our genes. That is never going to change. It seems to be part of our human nature.

References

-Essays:

CRUZ SÁNCHEZ, Pedro Alberto: “Realismo en tiempos de irrealidad: El nuevo realismo español a la luz de la posmodernidad”, Revista del Depto. De Arte de la Universidad de Murcia, 1999.
(dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/fichero_articulo?codigo=204920&orden=0)

COLEMAN, Catherine: “Evolution and Change: Transmutation and Metamorphosis in the Work of Dino Valls”, Dino Valls’s  Monograph– Ex Picturis, Zaragoza, Cajalón-Mira Editores, 2001.

GÓMEZ DE LIAÑO, Ignacio: “La vanguardia después de la vanguardia”, La polémica de la posmodernidad, Madrid, Ediciones Libertarias, 1986.

LUCIE-SMITH, Edward: “Dino Valls’s Painting”,  Dino Valls’s Monograph – Ex Picturis, Zaragoza, Cajalón-Mira Editores, 2001.

-Websites:

http://antoncastro.blogia.com/2005/082302-dino-valls-la-mirada-perturbadora.php

http://www.dinovalls.com

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caos_(mitolog%C3%ADa)

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/politics.html