Over the last few years, Leonel Valdés has developed a body of abstract work grounded in the experience of movement — geographical, emotional, and spiritual. His series Horizon, Voyage, Natural Mystique, and Changes explore how identity is shaped through displacement, memory, and the encounter with nature as both an external landscape and an inner territory.
Valdés’ pictorial language emerges from a dynamic interplay of depth and transparency. Layers of color accumulate and dissolve, while gestural marks introduce rhythm and interruption. Liquid fields coexist with dense passages of pigment, creating spaces that oscillate between stillness and vibration.
Rather than illustrating a narrative, the paintings propose a state of perception — a space where the viewer is invited to recognize movement within themselves, as if the act of looking were also a form of return.
“I paint from the experience of movement: journeys, memories, and landscapes that move between what has been lived and the intuition that unfolds in the intimacy of the studio. The layers of color, the transparencies, and the gestures form spaces in transit, where the image does not settle, but breathes. Painting is, for me, at the same time, return and departure: a way of inhabiting what changes“ Leonel Valdés