Dino Valls’ Psychological Portraits Feel Like Visions from Another Time

Spanish painter Dino Valls first trained as a doctor before devoting himself to painting, but the clinical eye never left him. Born in Zaragoza in 1959 and based in Madrid since 1988, Valls originally studied medicine and surgery before leaving the profession behind to pursue art full-time.

His haunting figurative works are rendered with an almost devotional level of precision, often using combinations of egg tempera and oil adapted from the techniques of Italian and Flemish masters. Pale faces, anatomical references, surgical instruments, cabinets of curiosities, maps, masks, theatrical stages and symbolic objects appear again and again, turning each image into a psychological puzzle. The influence of historic painting is clear, but Valls uses those traditional methods to explore something far more internal and unsettling.

The artist describes himself as journeying into the “deep-brain,” creating work from the mind rather than from a model. That idea gives his paintings their strange power. His figures feel both ancient and contemporary, exposed and unreachable, as though they have been pulled from memory, myth or some hidden chamber of the unconscious.

For more of Dino Valls’ work, visit his website and follow him on Instagram.

More art on the grid Dino Valls’ website