Francisco Valdés Chilean, b. 1968

Receiving his artistic training in Santiago, Chile and at Goldsmiths, London, where he now lives and works, Francisco Valdés has developed a singular painting style that is technically exact, theoretically rich and deeply conceptual. Valdés’s paintings anticipate the very materiality of viewers’ bodies as they move through space, their perception varying according to physical relation – disorienting, abstract and vibrating at angles, sumptuously tactile up close and finally crystallising into high realism at a distance.

They owe much to the Pop Art practices of artists such as Sigmar Polke, who meticulously, fallibly recreated the mechanical processes of mass media printing and whose meditations on the truth and reproduction of the image formed a poignant reflection on the collective psychology of post-war Germany. Similarly, the country of Valdés’s formative years as an artist was still reeling from almost two decades of authoritarianism. He works in the legacy of those artists who developed a highly coded, hermetic conceptual language to escape detection in Chile, where access to visual culture was distorted, delayed, or ideologically filtered. In his kinship with post-war artists such as Polke, Valdés reveals instinctive artistic urges that continue to resonate through the tumults of global politics, reminding us that images – systems of communication, memory and resistance – are never neutral.

Working from found photographs, Valdés plays on our reliance on sight: the faith, deception and failure associated with the notion of perceiving and capturing a truthful image. Frequently embracing synaesthetic cues from his subject matter, he exposes the duality of the image as both relic of a vanished instant and something insistently alive, allowing the artwork to be an active, everlasting encounter with the present moment.

In 2024, Valdés was awarded as a finalist in the 2024 John Moores Painting Prize. His work is held in public collections including Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) Rio de Janeiro, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, and the Misol Foundation, Colombia. Cecilia Brunson Projects presented his inaugural exhibition at the gallery in 2023. His forthcoming solo exhibition at the gallery will open in February 2026, coinciding with a solo exhibition at the Florence Trust, London.

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Essay by Michéle Faguet, for the exhibition Manual, Cecilia Brunson Projects, 2023

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