LAS FLORES DE KYOTO: Jesus Valdunciel’s Japanese inspiration

By Elvira Rilova

Over the flowered mountain

They let the horses go

Under the autumnal sky

NatsumeSoseki(1865-1915)

If art were expressed through a series of threads,and these golden threads were crossed and uncrossed, they would get tangled up with influences, untied and tied with cultures, times and feelings;Las Flores de Kyotoexhibition, by Jesus Valdunciel, would reflect the spiritual wealth of threads possessed by the artist,and his commitment to share them through the visualexperience of his work.

Jesus Valdunciel (Madrid, 1980) is a young but promising artist who started his professional career sketching graffitiin murals that date back from the mid-1990s.

His technique grew refined with time,and he began experimenting with those materials –acrylics, spray and other plastic paintings–on other traditional platforms such as board and canvas.He put aside the urban aesthetics and got into atavistic themes.

Interested in Eastern ancient art and its different expressions, he learned the Sumi-e style from ProfessorJeing Ho,getting specialized in drawing techniques with Chinese ink. The taste for details and excellence found in Eastern art brought him nearer to the Japanese paining, the source of his works.

The exhibition showcased by Excelencias Cultural Space counts on fourteen paintings featuring a clear Japanese inspiration, in which he uses acrylic as pictorial material.

His artworks vividly remind Ukiyo-e images, a painting style that was widely spread during the 19th century,coinciding with Japan opening to the Western. These pictures of daily life were very successful in Europeand America, and even had a direct influence on expressionist and cubist painters.

Within Valdunciel’s work we can highlight portraits of courtesans, samurais, landscapes, etc... Scenes of a pleasant, hedonist and exotic world for our eyes that, at the same time, projects us to a universal eternity.

The subtle and delicate gestures of portrayed people, with colorful flashes that break up with the taste for monochrome, take us back to master such as Utamoru or Hiroshige. Pictures of geishas and ancestral samurais that contain traditions and reach out our times.His courtesans are beautiful, fragile, and almost ethereal, just like harmonious and delicate flowers that are born and grown under careful education.

Valdunciel’s landscapes,on the other hand, reflect the excellence on close-ups, while they are evidence of a fine control of chromatism, perfectly capturing in delicate transparences of atmosphere the rhythm set by the seasons.

Las Flores de Kyoto is definitely a contemporary tribute to the grand masters of Ukiyo-e,a sensorial experience in the contemplation of ephemeral beauties and floating worlds to be visited at Excelencias Cultural Space from January 17 to February 15, 2012.