The most importnt in drawing and in painting is to be sharp-eyed, and so is Valbuena.

This painter was born on January 3rd, 1941, in Bucaramanga, Colombian name that makes one dream... Like his elder brathers Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Georges de la Tour whom he admires so much, and also his contemporary Cernus, he struggles to achieve effects of shade anda light. This in his oils as well as in his charcoals, engravings and lithographs, wich he passionately learnt to watch, analyze, search, piercing the secret life of mystery.

An eye which is constantly on watch and knows how to discover and draw out of light coming from outside, whwereas the night has already invaded the room where they think themselves alone, far from mis fortune.

In spite of many people's tendency to despise drawing's unless it is Raphael's, Fragonard's, Ingres', Picasso's- pay a careful attention to Valbuena's. Like an enegraver who he also is, he works the copper in the black way, obtaining most familiar scenes, with the shade and light that so strongly characterize his work.

Striking his paper with a multitude of powerful, thick and rough line, he knows how to combine some angles of radiant light, generating chiaroscuro, We ourselves don't know if the great, serene silence is a dream or a nightname, or if it is the reason of anguish and precedes drama.

All Alvaro Valbuena's talent is here, and this is not just a fine compliment. It is with this constant struggle with shade and light that he starts painting, with his usual sensibility, doubling a classical ability without unnecessary effects.

A work that does not go along with the dictates of fashions, and succeeds effortlessly in bathing its paintings and drawongs in a magic halo that both confuses us and charms us.