At the time of his solo show at the Pan American Union in 1965, José Gómez Sicre named Rosado del Valle “the outstanding figure” in Puerto Rican painting, “by reason both of seniority and of the high quality of his production.” Among the works included in that exhibition, Reflejos exemplifies the lyrical abstraction that characterized his work in the early 1960s as he consolidated the influence of American abstract expressionism, which he had encountered firsthand during the year he spent in New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Like such contemporary works as Composición en rojo (1965) and Composición en amarillo (1965), Reflejos is a study of texture and atmosphere, its flecked surface recalling the earthy, wall-like abstractions of the Spanish matière painter Antoni Tàpies. Its underlying geometry, patterned on the square, unfurls through variegated patches of gray ocher underneath a canopy of crimson. The painting’s chromatic richness radiates through its incised layers of pigment, applied and blended with a palette knife. Rosado del Valle remained closely associated with abstract expressionism throughout his career, and while his work straddled abstraction and figuration he remained removed from the politically activist social realism that headlined Puerto Rican art in the postwar period. Reflejos marks the apogee of his formalist pursuits; Composición 6:30 AM (1965), in AMA’s collection, and Reflejos de árboles de mangle sobre agua (1966) soon signaled his shift away from pure abstraction in their intimations of temporality and place. Though brief, this period in Del Valle’s career left an enduring, expressionist legacy of churning color and impasto, most powerfully reprised in his self-portraits of the early 1980s.
Born in Cataño, Puerto Rico, Rosado del Valle held his first solo exhibition in Boyamón (Puerto Rico) in 1944 and later studied under the Spanish painter Cristóbal Ruiz. He traveled to New York in 1946, training at the New School for Social Research under Mario Carreño and Camilo Egas, and continued his studies abroad in Florence and Paris. He returned to Puerto Rico in 1949, serving briefly as a consultant to the Division of Community Education and as artist-in-residence at the Universidad de Puerto Rico from 1954 to 1982. He was a founding member of the Centro de Arte Puertorriqueño (San Juan) in 1950 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Among his best-known works is a staircase mural, Vejigantes, commissioned for the Caribe Hilton Hotel in San Juan in 1949. Rosado del Valle was included in the landmark show Puerto Rican Artists (1957), the first comprehensive exhibition of the island’s artists in the mainland United States. Organized by the Riverside Museum (Bronx, N.Y.), the show traveled to the Instituto de Cultura (San Juan) and to the Pan American Union. With Luis Hernández Cruz and Olga Albizu, Rosado del Valle pioneered lyrical abstraction in Puerto Rico during the 1950s, stimulated by contact with abstract expressionism in New York and locally by Rufino Tamayo’s mural Prometeo (1957), installed at the Universidad de Puerto Rico. He turned to portraiture and still-life painting in the mid-1950s before exploring the textural and atmospheric dimensions of abstraction. By the 1970s, del Valle gravitated toward figuration, anticipated in his drawings of insects based on studies of laboratory specimens. His ecological interests ceded to an intense focus on the human figure in the last decades of his career, including a series of psychological self-portraits rendered in a gestural, expressionist mode. The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico organized a retrospective of his work in 2009.
