Hideaway

“Hideaway” the latest solo exhibition of Covadonga Valdés (Asturias, Spain. 1966) turns the Contemporary Art Projects’ Gallery into a room full of views where paintings resemble windows that discreetly transfer us to personal hiding places. “Hideaway” explores the artists search for places of refuge.

Valdés, faithful to her hyper-realistic technique, delights us with her particular vision of contemporary landscape. She claims the landscape as a tool to interpret the story carried within each picture. Through the portrayal of loneliness and intrigue the spectator is encouraged to participate and share in Valdes´s search for a hideaway within each image.

Valdés finds new site in-between the rural and the urban landscape. Covered with nature and lost in the heart of the big cities or in the horizons of the fields these landscapes become a refuge where to take shelter from conflict.

With an impersonal technique, her paintings transfer us to concrete places. Playing a game of ambiguity, Valdés finds the nexuses between the geography, symbolism of the Asturian and English atmosphere that comprises her personal experience. Images evoke the English winter or the Asturian summer and vice versa. Each work is a snapshot that is crossed with the personal journey of the artist.

The pink roses in “The View”, the mysterious curtain of “Nettles”, the structure without windows of “Shed”, or the caravan of “Target” provide sanctuary within a world defined by edges. A series of paintings where the complicity with the spectator grows and invites us to search the depths of the forest or to watch from the cliff tops. The nature becomes a symbol of the mystery in which once entered we feel like strangers even suspects.

Valdés creates a reality through her portrayal of light allied with the use of a neutral atmosphere, sometimes cold, to create intrigue. Focusing on unassuming corners of our world we are invited to view the world from new perspectives. A world in which the exactitude and immensity of the detail, and the balance and serenity in the images, gives us find a place to hide.

Hideaway, invites us to see a reality that the human being experiments in his solitude. The exaggerated quality of approach and detail of these paintings moving us to rethink the detail of the universe we travel. The places chosen by Valdes for this exhibition and the treatment of the colour, light and brush, invites us into a hybrid – English/Spanish – pictorial experience.

Covadonga Valdés has lived and worked in London since 1986.


Blanca Garay MA London College of Communication