Albert Mercadé
Natures
NATURES
Vallpalou’s ability to research and experiment with contemporary art has often been admired: this ability has been defined by others as creative speleologist or research adventure. We corroborate this perception which refers to a pictorial attitude about searching towards a rich interior landscape where Vallpalou always finds new paths. It is in this same speleological plastically research where the painter gets back at this exposition, now with new pieces on paper and pictures.
INTERIOR LANDSCAPES. Vallpalou has told us in the past about her interior landscape, starred by random spots on the first plane defining her most impersonal personality on infinite, diaphanous horizonless spaces. Now the landscape as a natural element appears more implicitly. With this, we are not saying Vallpalou has entered a period where she imitates nature; the landscape representation does not always presuppose a door to the natural world but -as the surrealists have demonstrated on the 20th century, or the Iranian mystics on the middle ages- a very deep implication to her interior world, with the interior eye, as Max Ernst would have said.
For this occasion, the painter does not only incorporate watery landscapes or rolling clouds, rich in the contrast that represent their cloudscapes and marine bands, but photography the stains (they are her visions, her thoughts), digitalizing her own strokes. The forward step in her meditations on the stain is better spotted on her series of etchings she presents. In this case it seems like the painter had inverted her compositional constants: The bottom goes up to the surface and takes the stain, which, far away from acting like an oil stain, stays paralyzed and interwoven.
The exhibition at Fidel Balaguer Gallery – the first one of Vallpalou at this space at Consell de Cent – reflects a bit of a new path taken by Vallpalou to search for the limits of her art through new techniques, and, also, the will to explore the limits of her leitmotiv, the stain, abstract and meditative, and in this occasion through its relation with a new format, photography, and with the blurred decomposition of the pictorial bottom. A splitting of her own limits which implies a new meditative view of new horizons.
Albert Mercadé
Historian and art critic
Revista Bonart
Vallpalou’s ability to research and experiment with contemporary art has often been admired: this ability has been defined by others as creative speleologist or research adventure. We corroborate this perception which refers to a pictorial attitude about searching towards a rich interior landscape where Vallpalou always finds new paths. It is in this same speleological plastically research where the painter gets back at this exposition, now with new pieces on paper and pictures.
INTERIOR LANDSCAPES. Vallpalou has told us in the past about her interior landscape, starred by random spots on the first plane defining her most impersonal personality on infinite, diaphanous horizonless spaces. Now the landscape as a natural element appears more implicitly. With this, we are not saying Vallpalou has entered a period where she imitates nature; the landscape representation does not always presuppose a door to the natural world but -as the surrealists have demonstrated on the 20th century, or the Iranian mystics on the middle ages- a very deep implication to her interior world, with the interior eye, as Max Ernst would have said.
For this occasion, the painter does not only incorporate watery landscapes or rolling clouds, rich in the contrast that represent their cloudscapes and marine bands, but photography the stains (they are her visions, her thoughts), digitalizing her own strokes. The forward step in her meditations on the stain is better spotted on her series of etchings she presents. In this case it seems like the painter had inverted her compositional constants: The bottom goes up to the surface and takes the stain, which, far away from acting like an oil stain, stays paralyzed and interwoven.
The exhibition at Fidel Balaguer Gallery – the first one of Vallpalou at this space at Consell de Cent – reflects a bit of a new path taken by Vallpalou to search for the limits of her art through new techniques, and, also, the will to explore the limits of her leitmotiv, the stain, abstract and meditative, and in this occasion through its relation with a new format, photography, and with the blurred decomposition of the pictorial bottom. A splitting of her own limits which implies a new meditative view of new horizons.
Albert Mercadé
Historian and art critic
Revista Bonart