Secondary Market
Julio Valdez-Gonzalez
born 1969
Dominican-born artist using painting and printmaking to explore water as a site of memory, migration, spirituality and Caribbean identity.
Biography
Julio Valdez-Gonzalez was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1969 and is widely known professionally as Julio Valdez. He moved to New York in 1993, bringing with him an artistic vocabulary shaped by Caribbean light, Catholic and Afro-Caribbean traditions, family memory and the constant presence of the sea.
Water is one of the most persistent elements in his work. It can suggest calm, reflection and spiritual renewal, but it also holds histories of the Middle Passage, migration, tourism and displacement. Valdez resists treating the Caribbean as a purely idyllic setting. Beauty and danger occupy the same surface, allowing the sea to function as landscape, archive and psychological space.
Human figures often appear partially submerged, reflected or integrated into layered fields of color. The body may be clearly described in one area and dissolve into abstract marks in another. This shifting visibility connects personal identity with broader cultural histories, suggesting that memory is carried through fragments rather than preserved intact.
Printmaking is central to Valdez’s practice. He works with monotype, woodcut, etching and related processes, valuing both their physical discipline and their capacity for variation. The pressure of the press, the reversal of the image and the unpredictability of ink parallel his interest in transformation. Painting allows the same imagery to expand through translucent layers, scraped surfaces and changes in scale.
Valdez has exhibited internationally and has also maintained a strong commitment to teaching, workshops and collaborative printmaking. His work links technical experimentation with questions of belonging: how an individual remains connected to place after migration, and how cultural memory changes when carried into a new environment.
Across portraits, water images and abstract passages, Valdez creates spaces where history is present without becoming illustrative. The works ask viewers to remain with uncertainty, recognizing the sea not as a boundary between cultures but as the complex medium through which they have been separated and connected.