José Luis Valverde. «Kusokan or in the second night»

16 de octubre  →  21 de noviembre de 2021

José Luis Valverde presents in Planta1 a set of works, a continuation of "In the blissful night", a project recently presented at the etHall gallery in Barcelona. Among his latest paintings we find formats such as the miniature, where the author attends to his pictorial references to articulate a project that talks about the passage of time through the representation of vanitas and landscape.

These enter into dialogue with large format paintings whose formal, figural and spatial differences enhance the intertextual and hypertextual characteristic of the works that make up the exhibition. In this work, the importance of the quote is projected on the need to rescue stylistic or conceptual fragments from the past, as well as specific paintings belonging to the pictorial tradition. This resource allows him to establish temporal and discursive relationships between the historical source to which he turns and the time frame where he contextualizes it again, thus allowing to establish chronological and discursive analyzes through the historical narrative.
 
The kusōkan is the Buddhist practice that attends to the contemplation of the corpse, whose transition to nothingness goes through nine states or phases. The image is presented as a ghost just before the fall, prior to the flight and the collapse into the abyss that Sartre already spoke to us about through Roquetin and his encounter with the cherry branch in La Naúsea. This corpse can also be understood as the creative activity itself, a walk assaulted with a dagger by Odilón Redón, Louis Michel Eilshemiush or James Ensor, among others, sinking into a pictorial jungle where we will discover the tombs through the dripping oily avalanches of ivory black.

José Luis Valverde (Málaga, 1987) has a degree in Fine Arts in 2014 and a Master's in Interdisciplinary Artistic Production from the University of Málaga. His work explores the revision of pictorial genres such as vanitas or still life, perverting the codes that characterize them and questioning the painting-object as a representation artifact through the use of black as a device to deny the image.

He has had individual exhibitions at the Griffin Gallery (London), at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Malaga and at JMGaleria-ColumnaJM (Málaga), among others. His work has been present in various collective exhibitions such as Espacio El Butrón (Seville), CAC (Málaga), Fundación Bancaja (Zaragoza), Center del Carme Cultura Contemporània (Valencia), the Museum of Contemporary Art of La Carolina (Jaén) and the Espacio Iniciarte, El Palmeral de las Sorpresas (Málaga) among other entities, and at fairs such as Getxoarte (Getxo, Vizcaya) and ARCO (Madrid).