Micky Mouse

"Valdés, in his work, seemingly inverts and reverts the points of view of the past and the present. Many of his paintings are windowpanes which gleam the past focusing from a new perspective images by Velázquez, Goya, Cranach, Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, the Master of Flémalle, and many others that have become part of the grand memory of humankind. these figures are often linked to the central values of European culture, its Christian heritage, its past imperial glory. They are, more tellingly in this case, emblematic images of a stable, Cartesian world, to which also belong Walt Disney's figures in their nostalgic anthromorphisim of animals. In the paintings of Valdés, Cartesian images give way to the new conceptions of chaos: complex, multilayered ambiguous spaces whose aleatory reliefs of tattered cloth, of burlap corroded by tar, distorted by paint blotches, are a distant echo of the illusionistic three-dimensional space of the rational universe of his pretexts." (K. C. Suarez, in: 'Manolo Valdés: Reflections of a new paradigm', in: 'Manolo Valdes Pinturas 1991', unpaged.)