Aurelio Vallespín Muniesa 

Aurelio Vallespín Muniesa, nace en Zaragoza en el año 1972.  Se licencia como Arquitecto por la  Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid en 1997 por la cual es Doctor desde 2003, con la Tesis Doctoral titulada "El espacio arquitectónico aprehendido desde la obra de Mark Rothko" dirigida por D. Jesús Aparicio Guisado. Desde el año 2009 es profesor del Área de Expresión Gráfica Arquitectónica de la Universidad de Zaragoza y compagina su trabajo de arquitecto y docente con su faceta artística. 

Ha sido premiado con el primer premio del certamen juvenil aragonés de artes plásticas en la modalidad de dibujo de la Diputación General de Aragón en 1989. 

Ha realizado exposiciones entre las que se encuentran las de “Habitando el color” en la Sala de Exposiciones del Centro Cultural Ibercaja en Zaragoza, Guadalajara y Logroño en el año 2007. En el año 2009 expone en la Galería Calvo i Mayayo de Zaragoza. En 2013 realiza la exposición “Habitando el plano pictórico” en la Galería Cristina Marín de Zaragoza. Su exposición individual más reciente tiene lugar en el Torreón Fortea con la muestra “tensiones” patrocinada por el Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza

Como exposiciones colectivas forma parte de la 1° Muestra de obra plástica de arquitectos Aragoneses organizada por el Colegio oficial de arquitectos de Aragón. También es parte de la 2° Muestra de obra plástica de arquitectos Aragoneses del COAA en 2004. En 2007 forma parte de la I Bienal de Pintura Mateo Soteras y en 2011 es expuesto en la Lonja de Zaragoza con la muestra “Visión emocional de una ciudad, Zaragoza”

Parte de su investigación ha sido publicada en diversas revistas y boletines de arte y arquitectura como el del Instituto Camón Aznar o del EGA Expresión gráfica arquitectónica. Entre sus publicaciones más importantes se encuentran “Rothko, espacios vacíos y lisos”, “La mezquita, idealización del desierto como lugar sagrado, laberinto”, “El límite físico en los cuadros: aproximaciones la borde”, ”La luz dibujada y el dibujo de la luz en las vidrieras góticas” o “La idealización del espacio liso”.  En el año 2014 se publica “El Espacio Mural. Sobre la percepción del espacio arquitectónico modificado por la superficie mural”.

 

 

TRATADO DE LA CONTEMPLACIÓN

All painters are an intimate environment and a form of silence. Aurelio Vallespin is a reserved painter who goes against the current. He reflects, performs trials of plasticity, he ventures into vertigo and dialogue, almost inadvertently, without emphasis, on the work of Mark Rothko, who is perhaps his reference (he did his doctoral thesis on monochrome art), on Lucio Fontana, Piet Mondrain and Yves Klein. In his paintings, and perhaps even more in his artistic thought, he finds good company, affinity, those borderlands where painting is categoric and at the same time gently, a labyrinth and space, infinite and precise in form. And it is also an intellectual adventure, the theoretical substance actually opens up to the gentlest of beats, deliverance and abandonment. Aurelio Vallespin is an architect: he is concerned about the pureness of lines, the exactness of volumes, the completion of prisms and perhaps texture too. In the long run, and more so in his case, these are also concerns of 
painters.

He started working with crayons and different pigments, he also used paraffin and he ended 
up with this element that demands sacrifice, calculation, command and patience. He still 
researches with paraffin, exploring different directions of sensitivity. This exhibition is at 
first sight a homage to that material item that orders in bands of plastic surfaces, stains, 
light, extension; the bands are laid out in symmetrical, horizontal shapes, and hint at escape, 
expansion towards the sky, that is what configures space. Sometimes space appears to be 
dense, others crystalline and even gloomy, but the painter gives it tension, tears, an accusing 
moment of execution, hostile harmony, a peculiar kind of beauty.

In the work by Aurelio Vallespin, his elements, the strips, strive to create a question, a 
mystery or a perception. Pure enjoyment for the eyes. Or a dialectic. Once the picture has 
trapped us, once the onlooker has decided to look further into it to actually see, and even to 
guess, that is when his first victory takes place: what Vallespin calls "a time of contemplation". Contemplation and concentration, ducking and diving, immersion of one's will, a fainting of reason: the picture grows out of the spectator and the spectator perfects it, concludes it with feeling, with deliverance, with the impulses that stem from the inside. In this sense, paintings by Aurelio Vallespin are deeply spiritual. Physical and metaphysical. An expedition into the unknown, a trembling of immensity. The body of the picture surrounds us with its invisible hands. with its folds and creases, with those battens reminiscent of seas, waves, skies and nebulae, beatings of wings, the threat of a storm. The body of the painting moves into a pictorial plane, into that space that makes it real, defined and perhaps profound.

If we say Aurelio Vallespin is a poetic painter, it could seem an incorrect term. He is poetic and restrained, mystic and demanding. He works everything: he measures it, painstakingly cares for it, leaving only the bare essentials to chance, even though chance is sometimes so generous with art and with artists and their "accidents". In this work we can see. He is demanding, thorough, methodical, perfectionist. He paints with pleasure and effort, with his hand and his heart, with his head full of intuition. And that is precisely what he asks observers of his paintings to do: at first sight yes, there is a setting, an appearance of the sea or sky at sunset, but little by little, with patience, we can see many more things: a whirlwind that has stopped. We can feel an invitation to stay there longer, ecstatic, as if we could hear a bird making time stand still with its song.


Antón Castro
From the Catalogue of the exhibition "Tensiones" in the Torreón Fortea in Zaragoza. 2014