Daniel Giralt-Miracle
Vall Palou Dos Mil Once
THE 2011 PHASE: A COSMOS IN TURMOIL
From 1995, when Vall Palou decided to push out into the language of abstraction, she has worked tenaciously to formulate new options within informalism which extend and enrich her visual language. In fact, looking at her work, anyone can discover its richness, variety of registers and the irrepressible will to experiment that flees from established stereotypes and formulas to explore new territory that extends the background and shape of her painting.
Despite the coherence of her discourse – sometimes more gestural, sometimes more material and occasionally symbolic-, we have decided to centre the content of this exhibition around what we could call the 2011 Phase, that’s to say, the works produced during this year as well as those works produced previously but which are prolegomena to this work, because I believe her work over the last few years shouldn’t be seen as a freeing from or a rejection of the figurative nor as a detachment from real references, since it is nothing but a deepening of the most genuine abstraction. Her pieces continue to be constructions (a title used in all her work), but are more rounded, foregoing rhetorical accessories. They’re tighter in colour and form, looking for a visual forcefulness close to what in the Tao is identified with the ku, the dimension of the void, that is to say, what is found at the limits of perception. If figuration constricts and closes, abstraction expands and opens levels of understanding. Vall Palou, instead of the finite, is interested in the infinite, in what lies beyond limitations, be they physical or mental.
There are two factors which illustrate this desire to amplify. One is the size of the work: large surfaces which, since they exceed conventional formats, must be handled horizontally. The other factor is the way the canvas is worked in that limits are foregone and in a concept of “all-over field” the pictorial fields are defined in accordance to her physical and psychological states, without following any determined style or formal code. In this way we discover in these pieces a firm will to flee from convention in order to let out a wide ranging expressive freedom that can show both pleasure and anguish. Her goal is to locate the observer within her visual experience, trap them there and have them enter the fullness and void of her suggestions, in their light and darkness and share the feelings and mood rhythms of each of her experiences.
The approach of Vall Palou has progressively undergone an approximation to the visual point of view and aesthetic principles of oriental culture. If Western tradition has centred on representation, in the “mimesis” advocated by Plato and Aristotle, Oriental culture, especially in China, advocates “xin”, the heart-mind binomial. For Asians knowledge integrates ideas, empirical thinking, sensations, convictions and affective states. For them, and also for Vall Palou, the absence of symbolic elements or explicit allusions to reality isn’t an obstacle to the comprehension of a work of art, but quite the opposite. It’s a stimulus because it provides a space and time, a shared circumstance in which the transmitter is as important as the receiver. That is, the artist and the viewer, where the culmination of this fact is the harmony that arises between both.
Arnau Puig said in 2004 that with Vall Palou everything was the result of “direct action”, of a drive that won’t stop until it has arrived at the end of an idea or certain experience, and although the road has sometimes been long, hard and complicated, there’s never claudication. Because of this we find some pieces that have emerged fluidly from this direct, compulsive and liberating action, but also others that we deduce are the result of a fight or long dialogue. One way or the other, all these works demand a slow, reflexive, almost contemplative look with a Tantric spirit. This allows the discovery of their magnetism and the sharing not only of their arguments but also of their aims.
In this tour we identify some elements that from a part of Vall Palou’s grammar, and that therefore we find in the majority of her creations. These are factors of light, movement, space and balance: Light as an element that shines through her work from different chinks, Movement as a general dynamic on the surface of the canvas, as a vibration of all its components, Space as a great background, as an approximation of infinity, as an aspiration to the cosmic. And balance and its opposite, imbalance, as constructive parts, articulating horizontal, vertical, sequential or fractal rhythms that want to unite the whole.
Carefully prepared and applied, colour also has a pre-eminent role. Vall Palou emphasises contrast more than concordance and establishes a hierarchy of layers that plays with transparency, overlaps, random reactions, liquefactions or dripping. Each phase in the application of colour allows interventions that bring specific qualities: reactions with the fresh paint, grattage in the drying process, washes to clarify shades, pickling, partial or total varnishing, which allow her to obtain a varied range of colourations and tonalities that are an essential part of her language.
Whether it’s because of their articulation, the depth of their visual field, their interactive colour, the coupling of their volumes or their material density, the paintings that we are presenting escape from flat two dimensionality because they have genuine three dimensional depth, which on many occasions demand tactile recognition as an enrichment of the visual experience offered by the artist.
As something specific to this exhibition I would like to draw attention to what I call “the black paintings”- thereby appropriating the famous name of a series of works by Goya- that we have engaged in a dialogue with the Raku ceramics. I want to pay special attention to this group of explosive shapes, concentrated in their energy and which open to space, stains that are in no way ornamental which, through their ambiguity, remind us of The Rorschach Test and that become an authentic display of Tachism.
Summarizing, I would say that, seen as a whole, the pieces from The 2011 Phase by Vall Palou refer us, in one way or another, to a cosmos in turmoil that changes daily. And this should not surprise us since she, like Heraclitus, the philosopher of change, believes that nothing is still, that everything undergoes continuous change and that everything is in a constant state of movement.
Daniel Giralt-Miracle
Art critic, art historian and exhibition curator
Exhibit catalog
From 1995, when Vall Palou decided to push out into the language of abstraction, she has worked tenaciously to formulate new options within informalism which extend and enrich her visual language. In fact, looking at her work, anyone can discover its richness, variety of registers and the irrepressible will to experiment that flees from established stereotypes and formulas to explore new territory that extends the background and shape of her painting.
Despite the coherence of her discourse – sometimes more gestural, sometimes more material and occasionally symbolic-, we have decided to centre the content of this exhibition around what we could call the 2011 Phase, that’s to say, the works produced during this year as well as those works produced previously but which are prolegomena to this work, because I believe her work over the last few years shouldn’t be seen as a freeing from or a rejection of the figurative nor as a detachment from real references, since it is nothing but a deepening of the most genuine abstraction. Her pieces continue to be constructions (a title used in all her work), but are more rounded, foregoing rhetorical accessories. They’re tighter in colour and form, looking for a visual forcefulness close to what in the Tao is identified with the ku, the dimension of the void, that is to say, what is found at the limits of perception. If figuration constricts and closes, abstraction expands and opens levels of understanding. Vall Palou, instead of the finite, is interested in the infinite, in what lies beyond limitations, be they physical or mental.
There are two factors which illustrate this desire to amplify. One is the size of the work: large surfaces which, since they exceed conventional formats, must be handled horizontally. The other factor is the way the canvas is worked in that limits are foregone and in a concept of “all-over field” the pictorial fields are defined in accordance to her physical and psychological states, without following any determined style or formal code. In this way we discover in these pieces a firm will to flee from convention in order to let out a wide ranging expressive freedom that can show both pleasure and anguish. Her goal is to locate the observer within her visual experience, trap them there and have them enter the fullness and void of her suggestions, in their light and darkness and share the feelings and mood rhythms of each of her experiences.
The approach of Vall Palou has progressively undergone an approximation to the visual point of view and aesthetic principles of oriental culture. If Western tradition has centred on representation, in the “mimesis” advocated by Plato and Aristotle, Oriental culture, especially in China, advocates “xin”, the heart-mind binomial. For Asians knowledge integrates ideas, empirical thinking, sensations, convictions and affective states. For them, and also for Vall Palou, the absence of symbolic elements or explicit allusions to reality isn’t an obstacle to the comprehension of a work of art, but quite the opposite. It’s a stimulus because it provides a space and time, a shared circumstance in which the transmitter is as important as the receiver. That is, the artist and the viewer, where the culmination of this fact is the harmony that arises between both.
Arnau Puig said in 2004 that with Vall Palou everything was the result of “direct action”, of a drive that won’t stop until it has arrived at the end of an idea or certain experience, and although the road has sometimes been long, hard and complicated, there’s never claudication. Because of this we find some pieces that have emerged fluidly from this direct, compulsive and liberating action, but also others that we deduce are the result of a fight or long dialogue. One way or the other, all these works demand a slow, reflexive, almost contemplative look with a Tantric spirit. This allows the discovery of their magnetism and the sharing not only of their arguments but also of their aims.
In this tour we identify some elements that from a part of Vall Palou’s grammar, and that therefore we find in the majority of her creations. These are factors of light, movement, space and balance: Light as an element that shines through her work from different chinks, Movement as a general dynamic on the surface of the canvas, as a vibration of all its components, Space as a great background, as an approximation of infinity, as an aspiration to the cosmic. And balance and its opposite, imbalance, as constructive parts, articulating horizontal, vertical, sequential or fractal rhythms that want to unite the whole.
Carefully prepared and applied, colour also has a pre-eminent role. Vall Palou emphasises contrast more than concordance and establishes a hierarchy of layers that plays with transparency, overlaps, random reactions, liquefactions or dripping. Each phase in the application of colour allows interventions that bring specific qualities: reactions with the fresh paint, grattage in the drying process, washes to clarify shades, pickling, partial or total varnishing, which allow her to obtain a varied range of colourations and tonalities that are an essential part of her language.
Whether it’s because of their articulation, the depth of their visual field, their interactive colour, the coupling of their volumes or their material density, the paintings that we are presenting escape from flat two dimensionality because they have genuine three dimensional depth, which on many occasions demand tactile recognition as an enrichment of the visual experience offered by the artist.
As something specific to this exhibition I would like to draw attention to what I call “the black paintings”- thereby appropriating the famous name of a series of works by Goya- that we have engaged in a dialogue with the Raku ceramics. I want to pay special attention to this group of explosive shapes, concentrated in their energy and which open to space, stains that are in no way ornamental which, through their ambiguity, remind us of The Rorschach Test and that become an authentic display of Tachism.
Summarizing, I would say that, seen as a whole, the pieces from The 2011 Phase by Vall Palou refer us, in one way or another, to a cosmos in turmoil that changes daily. And this should not surprise us since she, like Heraclitus, the philosopher of change, believes that nothing is still, that everything undergoes continuous change and that everything is in a constant state of movement.
Daniel Giralt-Miracle
Art critic, art historian and exhibition curator
Exhibit catalog