DESIGN

Manolo Valdés Takes On Paris

Located in the heart of Paris, the world's leading designer brands call place Vendôme home.
5 October, 2016
The high-end square often hosts unique art installations, including one on display now.
Spanish artist Manolo Valdés is remarkable for his versatility and his longevity, but it is his bold and larger-than-life artistic approach that is currently getting attention in Paris' trendy place Vendôme.

A new installation by Valdés in the square opened on September 8, with the placement of six oversized sculptures in aluminium, cast iron, rolled steel, and marble that reflect an underlying continuity to Valdés' work and his lifelong mastery of multiple artistic forms and media.
The Pamela, for example, reimagines the etching and collage series of the same name, featuring the woman holding a fashionable hand fan with a hat that Valdés' etchings render in blue and red. Those Pamela etchings, translated in cast aluminium, reflect the Spanish aesthetic and heritage that infuse Valdés' work, but with the painstaking artistic detail erased in this iteration and its classic approach to sculpture. Here, Valdés mutes facial and portrait features to achieve minimalist contours for Pamela.

The Pamela stands 4.4 meters high, is 7.3 meters long and spans 6.5 meters wide. The piece, carefully installed on an unobtrusive and slightly elevated platform, weighs an impressive 4,150 kilograms. It dwarfs passers-by, and those who stop in their strolls to shelter in Pamela's tipped, wide-brimmed shade. Napoleon still peers down from his perch atop the Vendôme Column, but Pamela makes for a sight to behold.
The artistic legacy of Manolo Valdés is equally impressive. It has been nearly 60 years since the artist left his studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia, in pursuit of his passion for painting. As his career developed, Valdés moved beyond the canvas to create art in multiple dimensions that include drawing, printmaking, fabrics, and his affinity for metals and metalworking. Critics have long noted his capacity for political statement within the craft, beginning in the 1960s when Valdés and his Equipo Crónica used pop art as a social medium to challenge the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain.
Images: Marlborough Gallery
The artist draws inspiration from Picasso, the French impressionists, and a pantheon of influences that help to shape his vision. Nor is it unusual for Valdés to approach the same subject with different artistic media, as with The Pamela. Valdés, in a recent interview with Studio International, said he's never sure if he'll be more interested in a painting or a sculpture, so he works on both simultaneously to find out.
Paintings and art and creation never come from nothing; they come from other artists and bits and pieces of other works. Everything that comes out new is always a reading of something else that's already been done. That's the goal: you have to produce a product that's different from a previous product. When you do something different, that's when people start to recognise it.
- Manolo Valdés
The large sculptures at Place Vendôme are made possible in part by the foundry that Valdés works with in Madrid, the city the artist calls home when he is not in New York. "I need a lot of equipment and robots and machinery," he said, adding that he chooses the metals on the basis of the image, like Pamela, that he is interpreting.

"Aluminium is very light, so it allows you to create a much bigger sculpture," Valdés added. "It is also very reflective and, if the surface is very large, it will reflect even more. My instinct tells me which material to use for which image."

That instinct is what told Valdés to choose aluminium for the Matisse-inspired La Mariposa as well. The huge butterfly, also created this year for Place Vendôme, stands more than 5 meters high and almost 7 meters long. The width of 6.7 meters accommodates the wingspan of a textured butterfly that alights atop a featureless female facial form. The cast aluminium piece weighs 5,110 kilograms.

Other sculptures in this installation include Los Aretes, a cast iron work that sets a woman's face as the jewel between two oversized earrings, and the La Doble Imagen in marble and cast iron. The Vendôme exhibit is scheduled to remain on display through October 5.
Banner image: Food Fashionista