Transition to Sculpture

Bookcase, 2006. Wood, 322 X 290 cm.

If Manolo Valdés’s paintings convey a search for materiality, his sculpture does so even more. Today, sculpture has taken over most of his workspace, his time, and his efforts.

In their ruinous aspect, Valdés’s wooden sculptures are very similar to the sewn-up sackcloth pieces. They are precarious assemblies of scraps of wood—with wooden wedges joining the pieces. “The wood is cut and broken into slivers and fragments,” says Valdés. With these embedded fragments, often of different tones, Valdés creates, as Kosme de Barañano wrote, a kind of three-dimensional mosaic. First he selects the wood while it is still green; the planks are then twisted and manipulated until they acquire the Baroque quality required by the artist. The way he works the wood is similar: after using a lathe to turn and hollow out the green wood of his Grecian urns, he deforms and cracks and finally breaks the wood into pieces, which he then painstakingly reconstructs. In this way, a table with books piled on top is re-created as the broken, rough ruin of an everyday piece of furniture. The bookcase series, begun by Valdés in the mid-1990s, also gives the impression of something marvellously dilapidated.

The ruin acquires monumental proportions in his public sculptures, from his Lady of Elx, created for Valencia and later installed on Park Avenue in New York, to the Menina of Alcobendas. I have visited Valdés’s studio on the calle Ortega y Gasset, an old garage remodelled by Antón García Abril, and I have seen those great ancient goddesses resting there as if recently unearthed after centuries of undisturbed sleep.

The head is a planet around which invisible satellites orbit, like the rings of Saturn. The head is an upright vase of strange flowers. The head is an anvil beaten by the smithy’s hammers. The head is a belfry where storks make their nests. The head is a fortified tower with armed warriors peeping out from its ramparts. The head is an island containing a forest of skyscrapers. These sculpted heads, with their infinite and overwhelming headdresses, are connected to the heads of Valdés’s portraits or of his graphic artwork—such as the series Woman with a Hat, in which the same heads appear, wearing headdresses that depict a sketch by Picasso for the young ladies of Avignon, the portrait of Olga with a mantilla, or a Cubist still life.