Paraíso, 2026: Francisco Valdés
For the inaugural edition of Paraíso, a new London art fair dedicated to Latin American art, Cecilia Brunson Projects is pleased to present a solo presentation of new paintings by Francisco Valdés. The fair is open to the public 16-18 October, with a VIP preview on Wednesday 15 October.
Francisco Valdés (b. 1968, Santiago, Chile) has developed a singular approach to painting in which the image shifts according to the viewer’s physical position: vibrating and abstract at an angle, tactile at close range, and crystallising into high realism from a distance. Working from found photographs, he breaks images into striated bands that recall the mechanical processes of mass-media printing, drawing attention to the instability of sight and to the ways images are reproduced, circulated and understood.
Valdés’s practice is informed by the legacy of artists such as Sigmar Polke, whose interrogation of photographic reproduction became inseparable from the political conditions of post-war Germany. Valdés came of age as an artist in Chile in the aftermath of nearly two decades of authoritarian rule, within a visual culture that had been censored, distorted and ideologically mediated. His paintings extend this history into the present, considering images as systems of communication, memory and power rather than neutral representations. Suspended between abstraction and recognition, past and present, they ask what it means to trust an image—and what painting can reveal by slowing down the act of looking.
Francisco Valdés received his artistic training in Santiago, Chile and at Goldsmiths in London, before completing the Post-Academic Program at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally including Are We Really Here? at HBH Gallery (London, 2026); Sun Tracks at The Florence Trust (London, 2026); Artificial at Cecilia Brunson Projects (London, 2026); Manual at Cecilia Brunson Projects (London, 2023); PAGES at Venue MOT (London, 2023); Cuaderno de Matemáticas at Molino (Santiago, 2019); and Fantasma Escandinavo e Outras Pinturas at Adelina Galeria (São Paulo, 2018). He was also recently awarded as a finalist in the 2023 John Moores Painting Prize. His work is held in the collections of Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami; the Misol Foundation, Colombia; and Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro, among others. He lives and works in London.
