Manolo Valdés (b. 1942)

'How does he succeed in changing the code of a Matisse painting to make it into something else? How does he paint it another way; how does he make the same thing but never as its creator would have made it? Clearly Valdés achieves this by changing the syntax, changing the code, which entails a change of morphology (of scale and dimension) and above all meaning. What Valdés shows, in terms of art history, is a territory used over and over again, like a shooting range, a testing ground, a dump or a notebook. On the other hand, he passes the details back to us as if they were secrets; on the other, thanks to the scale and texture, complicity and silence of his works, he awakens us to the immensity and solitude that history, like a desert of forms, communicates to us'
(K. de Baranano, 'Valdés, Material and Memory', Manolo Valdés, London 2005, p. 2).