Ignacio Valdez

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1978

            The poetics of Ignacio Valdez's work exhibits a spiritual dimension in his conception of drawing and painting, as both a discipline and a method. In this sense, praxis is revealed as a way to temper and elaborate one's emotions and impulses. Therefore, the constant and systematic process of engraving in the artist’s world is not exhausted in the results of each work. Rather, it functions by sort of updating a ritual that adds meaning to the time undergone, and, simultaneously, can become a source of self-knowledge and self-listening.

            Trained at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Argentina, and in various artists' workshops, Valdez's work has been exhibited in galleries and local and international institutions and won the first prize at the Salón Municipal Manuel Belgrano, Sección Dibujo, in Buenos Aires, among others. In a series of drawings realized with a black pencil and exhibited in 2006, grouped under the title Así, en toda la hoja, Valdez saturates the entire surface with graphite lines, creating a sort of brilliant and sensitive screen in which it is possible to guess the rhythms of the artist's body. On the other hand, in a series of full-body self-portraits holding different postures, he works obsessively on the outlines of the silhouettes, which shows an intimate work on himself. 

            At the same time, his trajectory exhibits a conceptual use of drawing that opens to other materials and languages, such as oil and sculpture, through which the artist displays a contemporary perspective of the technique that does not require purity to reach its maximum expressiveness. Thus, what was born as a drawing tends to invade the space or transmute into color as if the act of drawing were only the way to activate an energy that the artist then seeks to escort towards the areas of meaning to which the forms and figures drag him.