Darío Villalba is widely regarded as a true pioneer of twentieth-century photography. It is impossible to pigeonhole him within one single movement. Indeed, throughout his career Villalba flirted with a number of different movements but without fully ascribing to any of them. Indebted to Spanish Informalismo, and , his early works explored the principles of , a movement he discovered as a student at Harvard University. During the time he spent in New York he came into contact with , using photography as his main medium of expression. However, he soon moved away from that movement, taking photography in a new direction. Far from focusing on consumer objects, a signature aspect of , Villalba centred on human beings in an attempt to explore and understand the soul of individuals, directing his concern very especially towards those who had been isolated, forgotten and to some extent expelled from society. Villalba gave them a voice and a leading role through his work, asking the spectator to ponder on life, illness, solitude and death in a fully poetical and inspirational way.

Villalba’s photographs comment on painting; a painting which, in turn, is photography. After his early experimentation in the 1970s with the communicational limits of the medium, the artist stopped using it for documentary purposes, instead employing it as an expressive medium to tell a story and convey a message. Through alterations made with oil, pencil and varnish, his photographs acquired a new sense that transcends the image itself and gains a profound painterly and visual meaning. In spite of his deeply painful subject matters, his treatment of the image led to an impeccably beautiful, balanced and refined body of work.

This original work belonging to the BBVA Collection exemplifies the visual research Villalba was obsessed with throughout his career. Far from following a practice based on a straight chronological succession, Villalba’s work constantly revisited previous techniques and procedures as well as images he had used before but using them in different ways to obtain drastically innovative results.

The piece was commissioned by Banco Exterior de España for the exhibition Otros Abanicos [Other Fans], held in 1985 in the bank’s headquarters in Madrid. The show examined this everyday object, deeply rooted in Spain’s traditional handcrafts, and gathered a number of works by a group of young artists who had been invited to intervene on this historical element, sticking to the shape of Spanish traditional fans or Japanese round fans. Among the artists involved in the project were José Manuel Broto (1949), Carmen Calvo (1950), Luis Gordillo (1934), Eva Lootz (1940) and Soledad Sevilla (1944). The artworks were accompanied by texts penned by writers like Camilo José Cela, Antonio Gala and Ángel González, among others.

Darío Villalba’s work is grounded in , a medium he began to explore in 1982. This technique would then prove essential to his whole practice, as it led, for the first time, to the emergence of a purely automatic working method sustained on the absolutely free action of the hand as opposed to the deliberate reflection of the mind. In his collages, the artist used all kinds of materials—papers, fabrics or photographs—which he combined on the support in an automatic way. Pai-pai Fan with Coats and Dogs is an interesting example of this process. Created in 1985, it used a large Japanese round fan onto which he stuck painted papers, fabrics and photographs sourced in his personal visual archive and which had already been used in previous works: the photo of the dog was used in one of his encapsulated works from his earliest period, titled Perros (1974); in Perro doble (1979) and in a titled Perro andaluz malva from 1984, among other works. The same can be said of the images of the coats, which add an interesting three-dimensional effect to the composition. Those images came from a photograph the artist took in 1964 in Hyde Park in London of a sunbathing woman wearing an overcoat. Like the images of dogs, the one with the coat would be included in some collages from 1984, like Dos abrigos, Síntesis and Melo. This interesting technique evinces the artist’s ongoing use of the same images, decontextualising them entirely in each new composition by investing them with new meanings and turning them into totally autonomous icons. In this way, Villalba engages in an ongoing process of transformation and manipulation, a constant journey back into the past and a foray into the future in quest of new references and visual inspiration.

Pai-pai Fan with Coats and Dogs is a paint-less painting that shows Villalba’s fascination with the visual power of images and their ability to trigger strong tensions in the beholder. Despite the apparent disorder of elements (photographs, fabrics, papers and paintings), the outcome—and this is a key aspect of most of his work—is a piece of the utmost power, impact and balance, with each component playing its visual function. In it, the artist embraces his research in , the use and recovery of photographs and the manipulation of images, to create an artwork that explores the limits of sculpture, painting and photography.