Manolo Valdes

Marlborough Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Marlborough Gallery, Manolo Valdés, Recent Work, 1991, pp. 36-37, no. 3, illustrated in colour

Tomás Llorens, Manolo Valdés. La Intemporalidad del Arte, Bogotá 1999, p. 157, illustrated in colour
Valeriano Bozal, Manolo Valdés, Maneras de Mirar Mundos, Madrid 2001, p. 160, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon close inspection, there are isolated stable drying cracks to the thicker areas of pink impasto, inherent to the artist's choice of medium. Several tiny media fragments are loose within the frame. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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La Infanta Margarita 1990 is an important and monumental example of Manolo Valdés's portraiture based oeuvre. His celebrated signature style evolved from earlier Pop-Art inspired compositions of the Equipo Crónica group towards a more lyrical appropriation of iconic works from masters of the past - a dominant characteristic of the artist's work since 1982. In his unique way Valdés filters symbols of cultural memory and patrimony through his distinctive historically inspired vision.

Valdés is a great connoisseur of the history of art and, like Picasso in his 1957 series that revisited Las Meninas, is challenged as an artist by the strength of iconography of masterpieces, such as Velazquez's Infanta Margarita (1659). In the present work Valdés deliberately deconstructs the formal rigidity of Velazquez's artistic code "creating a bridge between tradition and modernity." Nonetheless the composition is shaped by an exceptional harmony.

Valdés distils Velazquez's baroque composition and focuses upon the bell-shaped structure of La Infanta Margarita. The perceived distortion is enhanced further by the abstractly reduced shapes of the figure and the noticeably increased dimension of it. Valdés's "informalistic" use of materials, such as burlap, erases Velazquez's masterful brushstrokes and delicate perspective and instils a dramatic vigour to the work. The immediacy and intensity of the medium and the rhythm of the texture have an evocative power, which animates this iconic motif from the usual history of Western Art with Valdés's new code of aesthetics.