Provenance: Graham Gallery, New York

ABOUT THE WORK

A member of the Park Place group of New York City, Leo Valledor is one of the rare Filipino-American artists of note. Descended from the first Ilocano migrant workers to arrive in California, he was by all accounts, from a fractured background: an Asian heritage that had an uncanny command of the English language and a grasp of stateside culture, thanks to his parents’ American colonial teachers. Additionally, he would have a coming of age in an atmosphere of African-American zootsuits and the lifestyle of the Mexican rasquache (or low-rider culture.) Valledor would receive a scholarship for the California School of Fine Arts—which opened an entirely new world for him and would eventually lead him to New York City. He would declare there that he had fallen in love with abstract art. In Reimagining Space : The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York, Linda Dalrymple Henderson would write, “To understand the history of a gallery as unprecedented as Park Place, one must look first at California, where the majority of its members attended art school and met each other. The Park Place shows attracted attention almost as soon as the space opened. Its exhibitions featured paintings and sculpture together, revolutionizing the way that new, avant-garde artists could present their art in marked contrast to the more conservative Madison Avenue galleries. Its cavernous spaces invited the creation of large works and interactions with sculpture, music, and the spoken word. Park Place became a significant part of the New York art scene until the late 1960s, putting a face on the city’s art scene for young artists and leading the move to Soho as a center for happenings that would in turn become the lightning rod for a whole new scene. It made art blisteringly cool. Paula Cooper, who would go on to establish her own gallery, was its second director. Valledor would eventually return to his native California where he would continue to produce his avant-garde art. In the work at hand titled Oasis, the requisite green has as its counterpoint a muted red; creating movement in the stillness, receding and coming forward depending on how it is viewed. Five of Leo Valledor’s works are in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), including a companion piece titled For M. In 2019, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York acquired two paintings by Leo Valledor for its permanent collection: Odelight and Serena, both from the year 1964, both acrylic on canvas (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil) Leo Valledor is one of a handful of Filipino-American artists of note. Although he was of Filipino heritage, his father being one of the first Ilocano migrants from the town of Lapog (a hometown shared with another ex-pat painter, Macario Vitalis), Valledor was born and raised in the United States. More to the point, he was a certified member of the California beatnik generation and the New York avant-garde. In San Francisco, he attended art school befriending several seminal figures who he would follow to Soho and create the ‘Park Place’ group. He was very much of the time in the 1960s that would ‘revolutionize’ how art was made, exhibited and perceived. High-ceilinged lofts invited, nay demanded, the creation of outsized paintings and sculptures; “happenings” combined not just the visual arts but music, poetry and all manner of experimentation. Valledor, in particular, was enthralled with jazz music and the work at hand, titled Enchantment commands one's attention like a saxophone solo. Because he was interested in ‘spatial effects of color’, Valledor almost wills the viewer’s vision to follow the jagged lines and triangles of grey purple and black, its shades traveling in intensity depending on how the artwork is lit. He would insist that his works could be — or should be — viewed from different angles; and indeed, doing so, creates many optical illusions of texture and color. A companion work, titled and also created in 1966, is part of the permanent collection of SF MoMa, among other artworks. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)