Ari Valdés

I was born in a port city where the rain arrived sideways and the walls were always stained by it. I think I learned to look at those stains before I learned to draw. At eighteen I enrolled in the fine arts school, where I trained in drawing, printmaking and the long discipline of oil painting.

In 1987 I held my first solo exhibition, Earth and Ash, in a borrowed hall with works hanging on string. I had little money, so I painted with soil, charcoal and whatever house paint I could find. The show sold almost nothing, but it taught me that matter could carry an idea without needing to illustrate it.

During the 1990s I grew restless with the canvas. I picked up a video camera and a borrowed projector and began to film paint at the moment it landed. I also made photographic series of walls, puddles and rusted surfaces, and my first installations, in which pigment fell from above onto the floor of the room.

In 1996 I helped found an artist collective around a shared studio by the river. For several years we worked without signatures, passing pieces from hand to hand. It was a generous and sometimes difficult experience, and it taught me how much of a work depends on who is willing to let go of it.

Alongside the collective I began to teach. I have led workshops on colour, materials and process for more than fifteen years. Teaching forced me to explain what I was doing, and I discovered that much of it I could only explain by showing, by pouring a little paint on a tilted board and watching with the group.

In 2007 I returned to painting with a clearer idea of what I wanted from it. Everything I had learned from video, photography and installation came with me: duration, the camera’s patient stare, the body moving through a space. Since then I have worked almost exclusively with acrylic, on large surfaces and on small ones.