Surface and Symbol: Julio Valdez and the Printed Image

Early Years

Julio Valdez's printed oeuvre attests to the significant role that printmaking can play in artist's career. Since1988, Valdez has made nearly 50 editioned prints, at least as many related proofs, and over 100 monotypes. His experimental mixture of techniques and openness to new processes continue to expand his creative program and the technical range of his work in all mediums.

Valdez grew up in an environment of prints. He still recalls the smell of ink permeating his boyhood house in Santo Domingo, where his older brother set up a screenprint workspace. As a young teenager Valdez experimented at his brother's professional workshop, which specialized in screenprint on paper, in the fine art tradition, and also on fabric for commercial purposes. Beginning at age seventeen Valdez studied for three consecutive summers at the Altos de Chavón School of Design in la Romana, where his brother had established the school's first printmaking facility. During the school year, he attented the National School of Fine Arts in Santo Domingo, where he learned lithography. It was at this time that Valdez recalls beginning to grasp the full creative potential of printmaking.

Valdez continued studies as a full-time student at Altos de Chavón and, after graduating in 1988, was among a group of students selected for a works on paper exhibition at the Omar Rayo Museum, home to a renowned collection of Latin American prints and drawings amassed by the prominent Colombian painter and printmaker. This was Valdez's first professional break, and precipitated the formation of the young artist group, Q-Atro XXI. 1 Feeding off their collective energy and momentum, he and his peers produced prints at a feverish pace. Over the next few years, Valdez developed a visceral connection between his creative inspirations and the hands-on technical processes of printmaking. By 1993- at the young age of twenty-four-Valdez had his first of many solo print exhibitions. 2

Collaboration

A special aspect of printmaking is its collaborative nature. Although some artists create prints on their own, most attempt printmaking at the encouragement of a publisher or workshop that provides the resources and facilities to produce and distribute their prints. This system can result in a rich and rewarding dialogue between artist and master printer. Valdez's printmaking matured and expanded in response to two such collaborations, which in turn led to important thematic developments in his work.

In 1994, Valdez received a prestigious fellowship at the Printmaking Workshop in New York, established 1948 by artist and master printer Robert Blackburn. Blackburn, who in the early 1980's had advised Altos de Chavón on the purchase of a press, met Valdez at the suggestion of the school's director. Shortly into their meeting, Blackburn offered Valdez a one-year fellowship at the Printmaking Workshop, a renowned facility that provides opportunity for international artists - many of color - to take classes in a variety of printmaking techniques, use the workshop facilities, and participate in exhibitions. There, Valdez learned new techniques previously inaccessible to him. It was a time of complete technical immersion and exploration. Moreover, the large, open, democratic space of the workshop, as Valdez describes it, encouraged great synergy among artists, both inside and outside the classroom.

As his fellowship neared its end, another opportunity presented itself in the form of a phone call from one of Blackburn's former master printers, Kathy Caraccio, 3 who was seeking a temporary editioning assistant. Interested, Valdez volunteered for the job. Within days of working as her assistant, Caraccio sensed Valdez's vast experience and asked him to create his own work on the press. This incident resulted in what has become the artist's most sensitive and rewarding relationship with a printer. "It was love at first sight," 4 Valdez recalls. In contrast to Blackburn's vibrant group dynamic, Caraccio offered an intimate working environment, in which artist and printer partnered to find new methods for accomplishing what Valdez sought to express. There, Valdez could practice quietly on his own, while Caraccio fine-tuned his experiments and slowly introduced him to new processes.

Technique

Although two dimensional, Valdez's prints are anything but flat. The ink, paper, and complex matrices compressed under the weight of the press create intricate lines and textured surfaces that are tactile. Throughout his career, Valdez has consistently engaged print processes that appeal to the touch as much as to sight. This method parallels the artist's approach to his mixed - media painting - applying a combination of acrylic paint, acrylic pigments, and ink onto paper which is mounted onto canvas or jute. In print, he achieves this layered quality with a similarly hands-on approach that combines an array of printmaking processes, often utilizing non-traditional materials.

Early on, in Santo Domingo, Valdez combined screenprint and collagraph, sometimes adding the technique of inkless embossing. With screenprint, a form of stenciling, an artist creates a design on tightly stretched mesh (or silk), and then forces ink through the remaining openings in the mesh onto paper underneath. In collagraph, various three-dimensional materials are fixed, or collaged, to the surface of a plate. When inked and run through the press, the plate produces a relief effect on the paper. Similarly, inkless embossing creates a sculptural relief by printing dampened paper on a collaged plate. By layering one versatile medium on top of the other, Valdez set the stage for his current immersion in the visual effects of overlapping and transparency.

Beginning in 1994, at Caraccio's suggestion and under her expert guidance, Valdez began working with the technique she terms "silk aquatint." Although technically related to collagraph, its name - silk aquatint - refers to the visual tonal effects of aquatint, rather than to the intaglio technique of aquatint itself, which involves powered resin and acid. 5 To create his silk aquatints, Valdez glues finely woven polyester onto a stiff cardboard or sanded plastic backing, and then creates a design by applying a mixture of acrylic paint and a gloss medium in varying amounts. The plate is then wiped (as one would an etching plate), and printed using a press. Those areas partially "blocked out" by the design retain much less ink, creating lighter shades of color. Silk Aquatint also allows Valdez the freedom to apply two or more colors to the plate at a time. This capability propelled his printed work away from an earlier monochromatic palette.

In recent years, Valdez has experimented even more aggressively with color through the addition of two techniques: à la poupée and chine collé. Subtle, painterly mixtures of color are achieved using à la poupée (poupée is the French word for "doll"), in which several colors are applied to the plate using small clothe dabbers (resembling a doll's head). This enables greater blending, particularly when printing with dampened paper. Chine collé is the method of adhering thin pieces of colored paper, torn or cut to a desired shape, to the larger printing paper at the same time that the inked image is printed. The poetic color effects of these techniques are accentuated by the texture of the fine polyester mesh underneath. The rich surfaces of prints such as Pair and Profile with Thorns convey this medley of processes.

In addition to his silk aquatints, Valdez frequently creates monotypes - unique prints made from a plate that has been drawn or painted, in Valdez's case using printer's ink, and then transferred onto paper. It is an intriguing hybrid that combines painting and printmaking for a spontaneous and direct outcome - an approach that appeals to Valdez. Yet the spontaneous look of this technique belies its complexity. Valdez often reworks the residual "ghost" image on his plate, adding markings to create a second print with variations. He also frequently adds handwork to his monotypes using wax crayons and gouache, further blurring the boundaries between his mediums. Me veo Claramente is one of Valdez's most complex monotypes. In addition to creating a traditional monotype, here Valdez has added a trace monotype by drawing (or tracing) on the back of the paper with the plate underneath. He also repeatedly stamped the back of the print with the circular container from an empty glue stick, thereby transferring the shape to the front.

Meaning

The texture, tonality, and layering of Valdez's prints - as well as the physicality of his processes - are linked to the meaning and symbolism of his work. As with his mixed-media paintings, Valdez describes his hand application of materials to the printing plate as a way of paying homage to ancient cultural traditions of Africa and Latin America. In addition, the symbols Valdez incorporates in his work suggest a deep connection to his heritage.

Although rudimentary and fragmented figures can be found in Valdez's early printed abstractions, a clear human presence - in the form of a silhouetted body - emerged in 1994 and remained through the decade. This change occurred while Valdez was at the Printmaking Workshop in New York. During this time, Valdez was without a painting studio, so the press was his only creative outlet. After settling permanently in New York, the silhouette motif spread to his work in all mediums, affirming the creative primacy of his printed work. Valdez describes the silhouette as both autobiographical 6 and, in its horizontal orientation, representative of a slave being transported by ship to the Caribbean. It is a human figure with an anonymous presence - a shadow or imprint that evokes both an individual's experience and a shared history. The absence of identifiable characteristics, such as a face, contributes to the sense that Valdez's figures are tied to his present life, away from his homeland, and to his ancestral past.

In the late 1990's, Valdez's painted silhouettes were joined by other imagery. He introduced plant, marine, and animal life - in particular the lizard and the Yuca plant, both indigenous to the Dominican Republic - as well as abstract forms and text. On certain canvases, collage elements with these symbols surround an isolated silhouette; on other canvases, the symbols cover the entire composition in a grid of collage, superimposed by the silhouette. Valdez's interest in overlapping planes corresponds to his printed work from this period. To compensate for the smaller size of his prints, his grid of symbols recedes into the background and the superimposed figure looms larger. In addition, he often reduces the silhouette to a bust or head to accommodate the scale of his prints, while still communicating the power of his larger painted silhouettes.

With the year 2000, came yet another visual and thematic change. In contrast to the silhouettes of the previous decade, Valdez's new work reveals the inescapable physicality of the body showing all that was previously omitted. Dismembered body parts and flayed flesh in works such as Features and To the Bones II suggest a new awareness of the human body and morbidity. Although connected metaphorically to struggle and his country's past, this work is also linked to widespread contemporary artistic concerns about the body and public awareness of private, internal functions. Interestingly, however, this shift in imagery has not been filtered through Valdez's printmaking. His new prints remain focused on the image of the head, perhaps because he has not yet exhausted all its technical permutations.

Even without the background of Valdez's life and techniques, his work can elicit emotional and visceral responses in the viewer. This is most evident in one body part continuosly depicted, even from his earliest work - the Sacred Heart. But less a religious statement than a symbol, the heart has persisted as a spiritual and intuitive insignia for Valdez. It is an emblematic organ that guides his art, as it does his life.

Judith B. Hecker, Assistant Curator
Dept. of Prints & Illustrated Books
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York

1 The name Q-Atro XXI is a play on the number "cuatro", the Spansih word for "four", which in this context means "for the twenty-first century."
2 The exhibition was in San Juan, Puerto Rico was curated by Beatriz Mayte Santiago Ibarra, organizer of the Latin American and Caribbean Print Biennial San Juan - one of the oldest print biennials. Later in his career, Valdez would be included in such print biennials throughout Latin America.
3 The K. Coraccio Printmaking Workshop, established in 1977, specializes in collagraphic processes.
4 Conversation with the artist, December 29, 2000.
5 Valdez rarely worked with acid-derived etchings. The facilities at Altos de Chavón did not include acid baths - which are expensive to maintain - perhaps directing Valdez to consistently rely on applying materials to his printing plate to achieve textured surfaces. Valdez's interest in "silk aquatint" may also hark back to his early exposure to screenprint (both on paper and fabric) in his brother's first workshop.
6 There are only a few painted portraits in which Valdez's face is clearly identifiable.