Dino Valls
PASSIO, The Passion, c. 1993
Egg tempera and oil / wood
72 x 58 cm.
Private collection
I am not sure what Dino Valls intended by calling his painting "PASSIO", but it reminds me of the Old Masters interpretations of Saints, and the olive branch shown would symbolize the description given the passion of Saint Olivia. I hope that this does not prejudice this beautiful work!
Saint Olivia of Palermo (Palermo, 448 – Tunis, 10 June 463) is a Christian virgin-martyr who was venerated as a local patron saint of Palermo, Sicily in the Middle Ages.
Her feast day is on June 10, and she is represented as a young woman with olive branches surrounding her.
Olivia was the beautiful daughter of a noble Sicilian family. From her early years she devoted herself to the Lord while declining honors and riches, and loved to give charity to the poor. In 454 AD Genseric, king of the Vandals, conquered Sicily and occupied Palermo, martyring many Christians. When she was thirteen Olivia began to comfort the prisoners and urged the Christians to remain steadfast in their faith. The Vandals were impressed by the strength of her spirit, seeing that nothing could prevail against her faith, and so in deference to her noble house, they sent her to Tunis where the governor would attempt to overcome her constancy.
In Tunis Olivia worked miracles and began to convert the pagans. The governor therefore ordered that she be relegated to a lonely place as a hermitess, where there were wild animals, hoping that the beasts would devour her or that she would die of hunger. However the wild animals lived peacefully around her. One day some men from Tunis who were hunting found her, and impressed by her beauty tried to abuse her; but Olivia converted them too with the word of the Lord and they were baptized.
After miraculously curing many of the sick and suffering in the region, Olivia converted many pagans to the Christian faith. When the governor heard about these things he had her arrested and imprisoned in the city in an attempt to make her apostatize. She was scourged and she was stripped and submerged into a cauldron of boiling oil, but these tortures did not cause her any harm, nor did they make her renounce her faith. Finally she was beheaded on June 10 of the year 463. More on Saint Olivia
Dino Valls is a Spanish painter born in 1959 in Zaragoza. Since 1988, he has lived and worked in Madrid.
Building on a childhood passion for drawing, Valls taught himself to paint in oils beginning in 1975. After completing his degree in Medicine and Surgery in 1982, Valls devoted himself full-time to the profession of painting.
As one of the Spanish representatives of the vanguard of figurative art, Valls' work displays the strong influence of past masters and their studies of the human being. In the early '90s, Valls began studying the use of egg tempera, adapting and customizing the techniques of Italian and Flemish masters from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries to create new works in combinations of tempera and oil. His paintings elaborate and expand upon the methods of past masters, employing formal figurative techniques as the medium through which to explore the human psyche in a conceptual framework laden with profound psychological weight and symbolism.
Valls has participated in important international exhibitions of contemporary art, and has held numerous showings in Europe and the United States. More on Dino Valls
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