Dino Valls

DINO VALLS Spanish painter born in 1959 in Zaragoza. Since 1988, he has lived and worked in Madrid. Building on a childhood passion for drawing, Valls taught himself to paint in oils beginning in 1975. After completing his degree in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Zaragoza in 1982, Valls devoted himself full-time to the profession of painting. As one of the Spanish representatives of the vanguard of figurative art, Valls' work displays the strong influence of past masters and their studies of the human being. In the early '90s, Valls began studying the use of egg tempera, adapting and customizing the techniques of Italian and Flemish masters from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries to create new works in combinations of tempera and oil. His paintings elaborate and expand upon the methods of past masters, employing formal figurative techniques as the medium through which to explore the human psyche in a conceptual framework laden with profound psychological weight and symbolism. Valls has participated in important international exhibitions of contemporary art, and has held numerous showings in Europe and the United States. "I know of no other contemporary painter whose work is grander in conception or more beautiful in its execution than that of Dino Valls, nor do I know of any living painter whose work is more filled with the imagery of pain than Dino Valls'. How does one reconcile the pain and the beauty? Are they reconcilable, and, if so, what do they mean? His paintings can deliver the same terrifying shock of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece or Titian's Flaying of Marsyas. Valls is our great contemporary master of pain and beauty. His work staggers us and forces us back to it again and again, which is art's most ancient and magical power." Prof. John Wood