Julio Valdez "In the Same Path as the Sun"
June Kelly Gallery
This event has ended.
An exhibition of new surreal paintings by Julio Valdez – a native of the Dominican Republic who draws his sensual inspiration and his palate of rich blues and greens from the sea that laps the island’s shores - will open at the June Kelly Gallery. The exhibition title, In the Same Path as the Sun, refers to a line in a popular poem about the Dominican Republic, “There is a Country in the World,” by Pedro Mir. It is also the title of his first two Water Paintings executed in the summer of 2004. “Those paintings,” says Valdez, “opened a new formal exploration of my painting process, in which I minimize the brushwork while creating a more fluid representation.”
Valdez’s paintings are aquatic theaters, the staging grounds for the artist’s reflections on his personal life and on the collective history of the Caribbean, where the water is a constant symbol of a Dominican’s exile from the wider world and at the same time his connection to it. Valdez’s mystical reveries capture the allure of the light, the strength and the spatial ambiguity of the ocean. Its transparency and visual instability create an enthralling sense of isolation and shelter, freedom and yet threat. He gives us a world where nature and consciousness mingle, where the sensuality of the tropics meets the isolation of the island man, and where dreams of travel to distant lands are tempered by the powerful emotional bonds of home.
Media
Schedule
from May 14, 2010 to June 15, 2010