‘The Idiot’. New Paintings and Works on Paper, brings together a series of new works by London-based Spanish artist Jaime Valtierra. They include a recent cycle of Paintings and Drawings (2012 – 2014), and a group of prints produced during an Arts Residency in Florence in 2014.
The complete show presents a departure from previous works and confronts the viewer with the artists renewed engagement with experimentation and direct expressive means within his own practice. The new pieces bring forward a hazy and intense vision of the artist
s own imagined universe, and emphasise an emotional exploration of his experiences and relationship with the world.
The works are a raw confrontation with an intuitive vision in flux, and exist (specially in the case of the paintings) as a sustained struggle to express and capture this personal insight. “To reject the image as something given or as an idea to be executed, and to conceive it instead as an impossible reality, an impossible reversal towards this fleeting feeling and its improbable depiction”.
This journey is what the artist describes as the will of the Idiot, an ongoing deciphering guesswork of the meaning of reality and its precarious “translation” into the “language” of painting trough his own power to imagine and verify its validity. The resulting body of work opens a window into a bizarre space where distorted / fragmented figures negotiate their existence in a hostile and intrusive environment.
Jaime Valtierra lives and works in London. His work centers on the creation of imagery that follows a personal, shattered and subjective understanding of human behavior and interpersonal relations. He works with painting, drawing, printing, digital media, installation and performance.
Recent Projects and Exhibitions include: ‘Ficino`s Cave’. Barbican Fish Island Labs, London; ‘Magma Collective’. Biagiotti Projetto di Arte, Florence ; ‘Edge of the Land’. Hundred Years Gallery, London; ‘Illusions of Reference’. Psycological Art Circus, London; ‘Cuidad Memoria’. Espacio Islandia, Madrid.