damián valdés dilla

It all begins at the age of seventeen, when his bouts of paranoid schizophrenia force him out of school, while his growing social isolation gradually fuels his need for escape. Discarded materials, remnants of a collapsed and stagnant world, become the building blocks for his towers and other vehicles. The former, dense and vertical, saturate space as if to ward off emptiness. The latter seem intent on abolishing distance and reviving the dream of Icarus. All express an unwavering faith in humanity’s ability to free itself from alienation and to escape confinement—if only through dreams.

These constructions take the form of a kind of heterotopia—autonomous spaces governed by their own rules—where reality is displaced rather than fled. Escape here is not a departure from the world, but an inner reconfiguration. One can sense echoes of the Facteur Cheval and Bodys Isek Kingelez in Valdés Dilla’s work, even of Piranesi. All the more so when one recalls that this visionary eighteenth-century architect created his famous candelabra using fragments and debris from the excavations of Hadrian’s Villa.

The shift to drawing marks a turning point. Where his assemblages held together through triumphant entanglement, his urban views impose vertiginous perspectives and a rigorous organization, the line attempting to stabilize what matter once overflowed. Even when the artist deliberately disrupts this order by inserting scenes of chaos and destruction, his metropolises remain traversed by incessant flows and strikingly devoid of human presence—as if humanity had withdrawn in favor of an autonomous system, unless Valdés Dilla intended them as spaces of projection.

Far from being marginal, such work engages art history at its most sensitive point: where creating no longer means producing for others, but making the world—be it inner or outer—simply inhabitable. As Paul Éluard wrote, “there are other worlds, but they are in this one.”