José Angel Valente is considered one of the Spanish language’s greatest poets of late. Although he believed that the poet, in principle, does not write for anyone per se, he admitted that in the end he wrote for the great majority. Thus, his poetic language was able to move with a style of its own between an almost inaccessible hermeticism and the broad universe of emotions, shared by most of his readers. Nonetheless, the emotion in Valente’s work is exempt of any passing sentimentality, since reality, that "time of misery" as he called it, imposes a language on the poet with "attributes of clarity". In the early period his poems belonged to the school of social realism characteristic of the Generation of 1950. However, later his work began to lean towards the secrets of intellectual lyricism and the study of poetry as search for the profoundly human, while aided by mysticism.
He was recognized with several awards for his career, which he himself defined as "a race with one solitary runner". Among these awards include the National Award for Poetry, the National Award for Letters and the Príncipe Asturias Award for Letters in 1998, which he shared with the late Carmen Martín Gaite. He died in Geneva on July 18, 2000 and his ashes were buried in the town of his birth, Orense, where he was named "favorite son".
The first collaboration of Manuel Falces, photographer, with José Angel Valente bore fruit in 1990 with Cabo de Gata. La memoria y la luz ("Cabo de Gata. Memory and Light"). The second book, Las ínsulas extrañas: lugares andaluces de San Juan de la Cruz ("The strange Islands: San Juan de la Cruz in Andalucía") , is a journey through the same itinerary that the Carmelite mystic followed in Andalucía, from Jaén to Granada, during which time Valente made a series of notes. On this trip Falces took the most emblematic snapshot of the poet which was included in the book, El vuelo alto y ligero ("The High, Light Flight" - University of Salamanca/National Heritage, 1998 and the Reina Sofía Award for Poetry). The third collaboration of Valente with Falces gave birth to the book, finally published, which readers will be have in their hands this March: Valente. Para siempre. La sombra, ("Valente Forever: The Shadow"). As Falces puts it, the book is a set of complicities containing small vital fragments of the poet, such as episodes of his while convalescing, photos taken at the table where he wrote musical poems with Mauricio Sotelo, and some snapshots taken during the Biennial of Venice, etc. The exhibit complements the book by displaying in one room all the signed photographs contained in this publication.
Borders did not exist for Valente. He strove to always offer a multiple view, an artistic body nearly always more intellectual than emotive. According to Falces, "for Valente, that which is literary meant an open sky of aesthetics". An example of this is the thought he conveyed during a speech before Queen Sofía in the Pillar Room of the Royal Palace on January 14, 1999. This was in honor of the presentation of the Seventh Reina Sofía Award for Latin American Poetry, given by the National Heritage Foundation and the University of Salamanca. In his lecture once again language was the meeting place for the arts and the creation of the world, as there was place for both allusions to the Psalms as well as Bosch’s "Garden of Delights".. Valente also incorporated two paragraphs from "Three Lessons of Darkness" (Tres lecciones de tinieblas) about language and words. This speech was the seed for the compilation of poems, El vuelo alto y ligero ("The High, Light Flight"), published by the University of Salamanca (in connection with the Award), as well as the work, Valente Forever: The Shadow. The original idea for the book was formally presented during the speech, although it had been germinating since the previous year.
Valente Forever: The Shadow came about in the form of a series of conversations that the poet and photographer had since 1998. Through some very short poems whose references were specific places in the poetic universe of Valente (images of Almería, Venice, Berlin, etc.) the idea began to take the shape of discourse, following a methodology which Falces calls the "shared eye". It is a journey in the first person dotted with fifty-seven photos, thirty-one of which are signed by the poet himself. Falces clarifies that "unlike the first book, where he wrote on tracing paper, this time Valente wrote with black ink right on each original photo." For Falces, Valente’s work should be considered as "a space" that represents "a literary concept of the poetic word, an image that belongs to poetic geography". This poetic space is formed "by a series of texts that make up a whole, body and soul", texts that find their container in the book and exhibit that the Fundación Telefónica now presents.
