Perfil con tocado rojo (Profile with Red Headdress)

From a rich impasto of fabric and oil paint, Manolo Valdés conjures a Renaissance portrait, an evocation of opulence and dignity. Drawing from the fifteenth-century painting attributed to Fra Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Man and a Woman at a Casement, held in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Valdés reincarnates the Quattrocento likeness in tactile richness. Stitches and pleats articulate the tumbling vermillion headdress which crowns the sitter’s head and hair, generously rendered here with sweeps of paint and folded fabric. Valdés began his career as part of the Equipo Crónica, whose members appropriated iconic images by artists such as Diego Velasquez, Francisco Goya, and Pablo Picasso, artists whom he has continued to reference in his solo practice. As Valdés has said, ‘I am just a narrator who comments on the history of painting in various ways, using new materials: it is like a game that consists of changing the code and the key to the artwork… Many of my colours, materials and textures are the product of relived experiences of other masters. My painting involves much reflection’ (M. Valdés, quoted in Manolo Valdés 1981-2006, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2006, p. 20). In Perfil con tocado rojo (Profile with Red Headdress), the historic weight of the image is filtered and refracted through Valdés multi-layered vision, a world in which past and present are joined, and where temporal fragments can be reborn in a textural poetry.