Julia Valdés’s painting has become a universe full of innuendo. The suggestive nature of her work emerges from the confrontation between new gestures, increasing materiality, and dramatic tension—elements that have defined the gradual transformation of her abstract discourse. The profuse drawing that long characterized her work, at times becoming the connecting thread of the scene and at other times as a calligraphic identity with a position similar to other pictorial actions, has given way to another way of composing the corpus of representation.

(...) Previously Julia Valdés’s painting sketched out environments, and many of them one could intuit a city and the bodies of the people in it. These traces faded from view as the somberly evanescent daytime environments gained prominence, which was her personal way of expressing reverence, in the abstract experiment, for the traditional landscape of the Santiago de Cuba of her birth. Cadence, softness, and calm were attributes that ac- companied the delicacy common in her painting, a feminine trait perhaps subtle but which could also be perceived in her way of arranging transparencies, choosing and manipulating chromatic requirements, and placing drawings in her paintings, as well as in the usual decentering by which she dispersed forces, offering up vital serenity and warm energy.

Illustrating the path Julia Valdés has taken would involve weighing her initial oscillation between the representational and the abstract, and how drawing has functioned in the course of her artistic career: from an almost essential role moving to a subordinate function by being inserted into spots, on the perimeter, or timidly appearing within concealed spaces, as her palette changed the course of her chromatic preferences or were subordinated to other topics that came to motivate her. That trajectory—which should be reconstructed sometime—came to show the ascendant rhythm of her discourse, indicating the stages of her work as a whole. Such a task is beyond the scope of this chronicle, the purpose of which is to provide a possible way of interpreting her more recent production.

Caridad Blanco de la Cruz, 2011