From the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition “Dino Valls: A Journey through Spanish Magic Realism“. Frissiras Museum, Athens, November 2011.

The Weight of the Unconscious 

by Fernando Castro Flórez, Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Art critic and curator

We could try to understand Dino Valls’ aesthetics as a form of meditation on the status of today’s subject. His paintings are reflections where anxiety has settled down, along with the painful processes of a split personality. In fact, the darkest beast lies within us. The most beautiful, even “heavenly” bodies are wounded and, through the mirror of reflection, bestow their questions upon us. It is about images in aversion, whereas faces impose the enormous, or even better, a Medusa-like kind of gaze. We are unable to escape from the disturbed or upset sight of the figures that Dino Valls paints, these eyes are focused to something that we are yet to understand, as if they expect something from us that we are unable to provide. Their symbolisms constitute allegories of the subconscious, define pulses superficially, allude to the process of transformation, and recapture the meaning of a thought that exceeds the reticulation of the rational.

(…) experts appreciate his technique and mostly what they describe as ‘immaculate brushstrokes’, an observation to which the artist responded that it is quite the contrary: “l use my painting to provide darkness, uneasiness, sadness. What I do as an artist is to explore that darkest and unfamiliar part of the human being. My painting is a way to stain the white”. What he wishes is to penetrate into a darker realm, to reflect the uneasy (under the Freudian concept of the familiar becoming foreign, in spite of oppression) and finally, to express the subconscious. Oddly enough, this penetrated by anxiety painting is exceptionally beautiful. The conflicts of life are not literally taken, nor do we recur to the rhetoric which characterizes the “culture of protest”; instead our painful condition takes an allegoric aspect, while at the same time a kind of immense power of the symbolic appears, as if art still has the capacity to fulfill an age-old “promise of happiness”. Active imagination, to use Jung’s terminology, the way it is used by Dino Valls, offers us an impressive and multiple (self) portrait where the present is sinking in tradition but also is launched towards the imaginary, the utopia of what we see comes to friction with the enigmatic presence of gazes that seem to be more vibrant from all of those that we come across continuously. A dissection of the subconscious through nude bodies, skin that might be the most profound, a fantasy that transforms and traps (us) in an entanglement between the mythological and the dreamy. Dino Valls is so right reassuring that: “a work of art weighs the volume of subconscious it displaces”.

From the essay “The weight of the Unconscious: An approach to Dino Valls’ transformative symbolism“, for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition “Dino Valls: A Journey through Spanish Magic Realism“. Frissiras Museum, Athens, November 2011.