Arnau Puig
Madrid 2004 compositions
TO SUBMERGE YOURSELF IN VALL PALOU SPACES
For some persons painting, sculpting can sometimes become a need. Long time ago, people would assist to an Art School so that they would learn the socially accepted conventions to give life to their artistic needs. In consequence, the artistic result was a carefully controlled image of the surroundings, although in extreme cases the artist’ subconscious would give way through the painting or sculpture to some very hard-to-interpret forms (the monsters), which the observer would point out as the author’s personality.
The result of this artistic style was plastic modernism; correct in the forms but loyal to the emotional impulse which made some authors dedicate their life to art instead of some other contemporary and more comfortable way of life. Finally, it is the practice of translating their impulses into lines and colours the only road to satisfy the artists’ restlessness.
The purely emotional and direct practicing of art and not its social validation or recognition is really what some of the most exigent contemporary artists have prioritized in their professional lives. Renouncing to the social validation is nonetheless a courageous task, even if some personality has ever decided to value the particular plastic action.
Magazines and specialized art journals give us nowadays all the information about art works and singular art attitudes. Vall Palou found his genuine art orientation in these information sources. She did not need to follow pre-established forms or anything else but her own intimate desires. Her sensitivity followed through the lines and colours of his plastic actions.
The process of creating has to do with using the instruments and tools that will transform pleasant or ungrateful or hurtful feelings into objects. It is not about searching the object of interest as if in a storage room. It is about having an artist’s sensibility so that the objects and the relationship with them totally and constantly offer themselves; the relationship can be sentimental, of affection or refusal, but the plastic result is never negative or inert but an offensive, confronted presence. Vall Palou wants to show us all of this, make us feel it like a real piece of art, and she does it through the painting, the assemblage, the collage. Painting -an accepted euphemism about disposing chromatic and material elements on a surface- is throwing oneself through colours and materials to the exteriorization of that unknown reason which drives the artist; the different successive layers of paint and paste establish the soul’s stratum. The softness or the hardness of the support tell us how to use the instruments so that they feel the need to act softly or strongly; each particular situation has its importance and assumes the responsibility in the final perception and communication.
The procedures and tools are present and imperative in every decision of the creative will; these, as in the case of feelings and emotions, rule in the art making process. Plastic action may become a borderless space, for the brushing or spatula run through it until it becomes non-material space and art fuses with nature.
However the initial action of the veils, or the manual insistence over the paste, has inscribed on the support the slippery or persistent emotions which the excited action of the hand set down all over the space that will become not only a very personalized diction of the artist but also the arcane of the inalterability of the feelings. The artist sometimes allows colours and materials to work by themselves (dripping) because in art – every artist knows that- chance and spontaneity are great creators just by themselves, for they depart from a maybe not resolved will; chance brings about many explanations which the artist might not dare to expose.
Another one of the marvellous resources of the contemporary artist is the collage: as a procedure, the element is introduced into the plastic space and becomes external. As an expression of feelings and wills, collage offers us the conversion of the artifice into the most adequate discourse. Vall Palou uses three kinds of collage: the spontaneous one which introduces the strongly desired real human sense into the piece of art; another type of collage to build the plastic scene in a formal compositional way every time the author decides to; and the third type is the plastically necessary recovery of those natural elements which have caused an impact on the artist’s sensibility even if in the reality they could easily be neglected.
It is the imperative and the force of the action of the spatula; it excavates and researches that of which is to be hidden. But sensibility and creative consciousness want it to become present. The proof: humanity’s history itself.
An artist might end up saying he or she has become aware of many things which he or she is not conformed with because evidences are denied. Art is precisely the contradiction that always wins to make acceptable what it was not.
Submerge yourselves into Vall Palou’s art and you will find first the pleasure of the senses and then the emotional fulfilling. Anything else or different is entirely up to you, loneliness and without art.
Arnau Puig
Philosopher and art critic
Catálogo de la exposición
For some persons painting, sculpting can sometimes become a need. Long time ago, people would assist to an Art School so that they would learn the socially accepted conventions to give life to their artistic needs. In consequence, the artistic result was a carefully controlled image of the surroundings, although in extreme cases the artist’ subconscious would give way through the painting or sculpture to some very hard-to-interpret forms (the monsters), which the observer would point out as the author’s personality.
The result of this artistic style was plastic modernism; correct in the forms but loyal to the emotional impulse which made some authors dedicate their life to art instead of some other contemporary and more comfortable way of life. Finally, it is the practice of translating their impulses into lines and colours the only road to satisfy the artists’ restlessness.
The purely emotional and direct practicing of art and not its social validation or recognition is really what some of the most exigent contemporary artists have prioritized in their professional lives. Renouncing to the social validation is nonetheless a courageous task, even if some personality has ever decided to value the particular plastic action.
Magazines and specialized art journals give us nowadays all the information about art works and singular art attitudes. Vall Palou found his genuine art orientation in these information sources. She did not need to follow pre-established forms or anything else but her own intimate desires. Her sensitivity followed through the lines and colours of his plastic actions.
The process of creating has to do with using the instruments and tools that will transform pleasant or ungrateful or hurtful feelings into objects. It is not about searching the object of interest as if in a storage room. It is about having an artist’s sensibility so that the objects and the relationship with them totally and constantly offer themselves; the relationship can be sentimental, of affection or refusal, but the plastic result is never negative or inert but an offensive, confronted presence. Vall Palou wants to show us all of this, make us feel it like a real piece of art, and she does it through the painting, the assemblage, the collage. Painting -an accepted euphemism about disposing chromatic and material elements on a surface- is throwing oneself through colours and materials to the exteriorization of that unknown reason which drives the artist; the different successive layers of paint and paste establish the soul’s stratum. The softness or the hardness of the support tell us how to use the instruments so that they feel the need to act softly or strongly; each particular situation has its importance and assumes the responsibility in the final perception and communication.
The procedures and tools are present and imperative in every decision of the creative will; these, as in the case of feelings and emotions, rule in the art making process. Plastic action may become a borderless space, for the brushing or spatula run through it until it becomes non-material space and art fuses with nature.
However the initial action of the veils, or the manual insistence over the paste, has inscribed on the support the slippery or persistent emotions which the excited action of the hand set down all over the space that will become not only a very personalized diction of the artist but also the arcane of the inalterability of the feelings. The artist sometimes allows colours and materials to work by themselves (dripping) because in art – every artist knows that- chance and spontaneity are great creators just by themselves, for they depart from a maybe not resolved will; chance brings about many explanations which the artist might not dare to expose.
Another one of the marvellous resources of the contemporary artist is the collage: as a procedure, the element is introduced into the plastic space and becomes external. As an expression of feelings and wills, collage offers us the conversion of the artifice into the most adequate discourse. Vall Palou uses three kinds of collage: the spontaneous one which introduces the strongly desired real human sense into the piece of art; another type of collage to build the plastic scene in a formal compositional way every time the author decides to; and the third type is the plastically necessary recovery of those natural elements which have caused an impact on the artist’s sensibility even if in the reality they could easily be neglected.
It is the imperative and the force of the action of the spatula; it excavates and researches that of which is to be hidden. But sensibility and creative consciousness want it to become present. The proof: humanity’s history itself.
An artist might end up saying he or she has become aware of many things which he or she is not conformed with because evidences are denied. Art is precisely the contradiction that always wins to make acceptable what it was not.
Submerge yourselves into Vall Palou’s art and you will find first the pleasure of the senses and then the emotional fulfilling. Anything else or different is entirely up to you, loneliness and without art.
Arnau Puig
Philosopher and art critic
Catálogo de la exposición