Daniel Valencia’s painting is fraught with complexities. In his work, the image never reaches a definitive point: it is constructed, superimposed, and intermingled, and its forms engage in a dialogue with one another. Behind this restlessness lies an active engagement with the craft and a constant questioning of the image’s potential—how it is assembled, what lies hidden within its layers, and what happens when one reference intersects with another on the same plane.
Fuego en mi mente takes its name from Joe Arroyo’s album released by Discos Fuentes in 1988. This album dates from a time when Arroyo had already established his own distinctive sound, blending salsa with the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Colombian rhythms of the coast. In Valencia’s series of paintings, Joe appears almost as a strange patron saint: a figure who persistently traverses the artist’s imagination. The artist wonders about the melody, the context, the associations a song allows, and, above all, the images that are created when we listen.
From there, a unique archival exercise begins. Daniel collects images, saves them, observes them, and allows them to form new visual relationships. Some come from a personal archive; others he creates himself based on his own interpretation. Between them, he constructs a territory where painting begins to behave like a collage: one image meets another, a historical reference intersects with a song, a recognizable figure appears alongside something we cannot quite identify. For his part, the color red occupies a central place in this quest. In his studio, Daniel looks to the Baroque tradition, exploring the question of apparitions through light, color, and darkness. Biblical, mystical, and historical references then begin to emerge as subtle allusions: fragments of a visual tradition that interweave, overlap, and influence one another.
There is an almost cannibalistic logic to this. The references devour one another: music produces images, images summon other images, art history confronts the personal archive and what Daniel recreates through painting. Each layer modifies the previous one, creating a narrative while simultaneously erasing it.
Thus, in the face of the contemporary barrage of images, this process proposes a different pace. There is something artisanal about what Daniel paints: he lingers on the images to dismantle and remake them. That is why what we see in his paintings is never fully resolved. There is always something beneath the surface, something that barely appears, something we cannot quite recognize. The image, thus, is not contained: it overflows with information, language, and associations.
Fuego en mi mente is, ultimately, an exploration of how an image can continue to unfold after it has been painted. A song can become color, a found image can become another, a Baroque reference can coexist with Joe Arroyo. Thus, this series of paintings forges connections like melodies that never stop playing. Its mystery opens up many possible interpretations. What is seen and what is not coexist in a sort of theater of the image, where each element leads to more than one interpretation. We recognize something and, in that very moment, discover that what we were seeing has been transformed.
