The artist César del Valle presents 'Diurnal' at La Balsa Arte, continuing the exploration of the line and the plane as structuring the space. As its name implies, it is an event that takes place in time.

In his work, akin to sculptural minimalism, space is conceived as a container susceptible of being intervened by ideal planes open to the viewer's perception. With them, limits such as 'inside', 'outside' or 'between' are defined, making the space the receptacle and the artist the artificer.

The work seems to synthesize Kandinsky's idea outlined in "Point and line on the plane", approaching the reduction of the elements to their minimum possible expression. For the artist these referred to the construction of the pictorial plane, while in Del Valle the emphasis is different: the plane as virtuality, from the point as a reference to the line drawn by the eye to recreate at a perceptual level (and therefore cerebral) the image of what is suggested, not being materially there.
His constructions are contained by the space, analogous to what happens with the installation or performance, where the work merges with its surroundings, so that the experience is linked to the unique conditions of the containing space. Each of Del Valle's works is an event presented in the here and now.

Del Valle recognizes himself in the work of artists as diverse as Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback, or Barnett Newman, among others. While these are important referents, the experience brought about by their work invites us to consider other trends that are closer to home.

This is the case of Michel Paraskos, theorist of the 'New Aesthetics', who, despite his encounters with conceptualism, emphasizes art's commitment to the contemporary world. Today it is, in his opinion, about the irruption of physical materiality and its concrete presence in dialogue with a particular environment. He points out that the current capacity of art to create more aggressive and less passive experiences makes it particularly threatening to an aesthetic framed in static postures. As part of his inquiry into the relationship between art and anarchism, he points out that the viewer's interaction with the physical dynamics of the work constitutes the fundamental objective of art.

In Del Valle, the words displacement, movement, transparency or limit acquire a particular resonance because they are constituted in the experience of the work, not its image. It speaks to us obliquely of the moment, of temporality, of the fragility of being, of our place in the world; something of 'resistance' in a figurative sense, it creates awareness of one's own body. Fred Sandback said, "I would rather be in the middle of a situation than on one side, looking in or looking out. Surfaces seem to imply that what's interesting is inside them or behind them." In other words, opacity and transparency are illusions; here space is produced and materialized through its mental, physical and social interaction with the viewer; this is left to us in the presence of 'Diurno'.

Ana Patricia Gómez Jaramillo.