Manolo Valdés (b. 1942)

'The technique of Manolo Valdés' paintings is a collection of daring experiments, a frenzied culmination of everything that has done previously with texture experimentation and the free combination of expressive media. He has achieved a very personal 'manner of channelling his interpretations of what means his voraciously sensitive eyes, proving that the distortion of a medium does not damage the sensation of the whole, but rather sharpens it. It seems that the surprising use of materials that are usually spurned make the artist's miracle-working mission more evident; he knows how to elicit new emotions from these materials, often basing his creations on artwork from the past, of which he is a self-confessed devotee. His faceless portraits are not merely a tribute to the classical models, which he comes close to and venerates without undue adulation. They are also a statement of his own art, free, joyfully crafted with a repeated emphasis on craftsmanship, which magically substitutes the more or less faithful reproduction of the model for a confident complacency with that 'is seen in his work once it is freed from the 'pretext.' (M.J. Salazar, Manolo Valdés 1981-2006, exh. cat., Madrid, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, 2006, p. 41).