Dino Valls is pretty intense. This self-taught Spanish artist was born in 1959 & completed a degree in Medicine and Surgery in 1982 … and gave it up to be a painter. His medium of choice is the notoriously difficult egg tempera, which he uses to create incredibly detailed images referencing religious art, medical textbooks, and his own psychological landscape suffused with the luminosity and richness of colour of the masters. As hard as it may be to believe, he does not work from models. A lot of people see sadism and torture in his work, but for anyone that has taken the time to leaf through surgery and pathology textbooks or seen paintings of the Holy Martyrs, the imagery is familiar. Less torturous than taxonomical, Valls has essentially created his own private genre. The overall effect is quite terrific, in both senses of the word.

Dino Valls, “Forabilis”, 2000

(…) he is a Spanish representative of a new and intriguing kind of art which is beginning to subvert some of the most cherished assumptions of 20th century Modernism, and which, in addition, radically challenges established notions about what is, and is not, avant-garde. (…)
In Valls’ paintings it is the psychological situation itself which is the subject. His figures, not painted from life as I have said, earlier, are essentially vessels, containers for emotional events, which they hold up for our inspection rather as we look at liquid held in a transparent vessel.
(…) His figures now confront us in their own right. What they embody is something which does not have struggle to be modern or contemporary as these terms are usually defined. These are not comforting pictures. They bear no resemblance to a good armchair, which is what Matisse said a successful painting ought to be. They impress because of their skill, and the delicate poetry which informs them. All the same, what is true memorable about them comes from elsewhere: It is the accuracy with which they reflect the uncertain spirit of our times. What makes this impress as much as it does, is not accuracy alone, but the intellectual sophistication with which what the artist has to say is communicated. At a time when we have almost forgotten what good painting can be like, what it can in fact do, here are the products of an artist who is fully conscious of his own powers.
– Edward Lucie-Smith

Dino Valls – Introitus I – II – III – 2000

Valls’ work is, in many instances NSFW, but if you can peruse an excellent selection of fairly large images in slideshow format on his site.

Dino Valls – “Lectio”, 2006