Career Path | Statement | Curriculum Vitae
| Artist's Statement |
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In my work, I look to capture the transcendent, that which is common to all mankind.
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To do this, I explore the human condition by making use (or appropriating) the expressive potential of the light.
Duality and time are both essential concepts in this search.
The duality between the individual and his masks, between the light and the darkness, between what is seen and what is perceived, between what is represented (what is seen) and what is evoked in an image.
To me, time is a mystery that swings back and forth, like a pendulum, between the real and the imaginary.
In my work, I look to capture the fleeting nature of time through an immediate creative action which tries to express the temporal essence of what is being represented.
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Painting |
Based on real models, the painting of Juan Carlos del Valle challenges conventional ideas of how reality is represented. A mixture of figurative and abstract realism, his painting establishes a kind of game between what appears to be represented - what is seen – and what is actually represented - what is perceived-
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| Series: |
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| · Foods |
In the series Foods, Del Valle approaches reality displaying, discreetly and with a certain degree of premeditation, his symbolic essence and his visual presentation. Whether it is with traced figures or with apparently abstract shapes, Foods – whether complete or random samples – are representations based on a real model.
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| · Faces |
In the series Faces, the atmospheres become settings and disguises, which transfigure the physiognomy of the character in imaginative re-creations of a human condition that wavers between covering-up and uncovering.
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· Remains |
In the series, Remains, the remnants are the central theme in an exercise of critical thinking which makes clear the imperceptible limit that exists between the beginning and the end, between life and death or between creation and destruction. |
Drawing
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Considered the closest and fastest means to capture the fleetingness of the moment, drawing represents, for Juan Carlos del Valle, that primeval territory in which the illumination and the darkness are expressed in an image.
An admirer of the emotion elicited by the contrasts in lighting of the expressionist and surrealist cinema of the first half of the twentieth century, Del Valle delves in the perception and representation of reality through two series in which he deals with figurative, abstract and fictional realisms.
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Series:
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· Drawing Stills
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Created from technological images in motion, these drawing capture immediate perceptions coming from the televisión and from video transmissions. Expanded between the tracing of the figure and the expressionist abstraction, the Drawing Stills combine and merge three realities: that of the scene director, that of the actors and that of Juan Carlos del Valle.
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· Cinematographic Atmospheres: |
Being an avid fan of the realist-expressionist cinema produced between the 1920s and the 197 0s, and the creator of an artistic expression which focuses on the expressiveness of light, the work of Juan Carlos naturally reflects his admiration for the cinematographic aesthetic of those decades.
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Based on fictional characters taken from different mythologies, Del Valle creates faces, environments and emotions, keeping as a reference the poetic expressions of light and shade characteristic of the German, North American and Mexican Cinema of the 1920s to the 1950s.
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The artist controls and is able to exploit and work with the blends of the light and the dark from a scenic and dramatic perspective, with an aesthetic idea that is based on the of the power of the twilight.
Juan Carlos has been able to go from the technical mastery which is the result of his strict and solid foundation to creating images of the kind which, being contemporary, capture the essence of the costumbrist and bring to mind his preference for the expressiveness that characterized Mexican cinema from the 1920s to the 1940s, particularly the “Indio Fernandez” movies.
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