Julio Valdez Exhibition

June Kelly Gallery

poster for Julio Valdez Exhibition

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 rich palate of blues and greens from the sea that laps the island’s shores — will open at the June Kelly Gallery on Friday, November 7. The works will remain on view through December 9.

The exhibition title, Para Soñar el Sol (In Order to Dream the Sun), was taken from the song, Sueño de Una Noche de Verano (Midsummer’s Night Dream), by Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, whose lyrics have inspired many of the images in Valdez’s work throughout his career.

Valdez’s paintings are aquatic theaters that reflect a view of the sea that is both dreamlike and hallucinatory. For Valdez, the sea is a metaphor for consciousness and the creative spirit. The sea is a route to exile as well as a means of reunion. Valdez uses the water, as well as the intensity of the sun, as constant symbols of a Dominican’s devotion to his island.

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 unsettling sense of isolation and shelter, freedom and threat. He gives us a world where nature and consciousness mingle, where the sensuality of the tropics meets the isolation of the island life, and where dreams of travel to distant lands are tempered by the powerful emotional bonds of home.

Media

Schedule

from November 07, 2014 to December 09, 2014

Artist(s)

Julio Valdez

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