What is this veil, —  weightless, transparent, diffuse, —  that envelops the objects, the people, the landscapes painted by Xavier Valls? It would seem that this veil has little in common with the impressionistic indefiniteness with which for instance Eugène Carrière suffused his Paul Verlaine and his Maternité; little in common, too, with the mistiness of Turner's later landscapes. With the impressionists the outlines of objects dissolve into a haziness expressive of the general durability of the perceptible world, unlike Valls whose silhouettes retain their plasticity and sharpness of outline beneath the light veil. In its bowl the fruit presents the subtle distinctions of its delicate colours, its velvety and delectable curves. Here nudity does not signify austerity. Is this not rather an ultra-sensitive vibration inherent in the painter's approach to his art than a veil, inseparable from his brush-work?

It is manifest that Valls only seldom paints the human face. Is this in any sense a feeling of reserve?

Only his nearest and dearest —  Luisa and the children, whom he ardently loves —  may belong to the intimacy of his visual world. Apart from these faces Valls' painting pulses with what is commonly known as the soul of things. Valls perceives and reveals the unpretentious beauty of a straw-chair in all its silence. And this fruit, these flowers that seem to display themselves before us and to carry on the silent dialogue of familiar things — should these be “ still life ” ? Quite the contrary, they are “ talking life ” ! Absorbed in the great quiet, we seem to discover the existence of inexplicable interrelations between let us say a flower-vase or a plate of fruit on the left, the vertical outline of a bottle on the right, or then the reverse. In the sweeping immobility of co-existence we sense something like a secret activity. Even the landscapes where above all we find the arching sky, the vast distance and the soft grey of the clouds, — the contour of the clouds sloping towards the horizon at the Lake of Como, a dream Pantheon supposedly visible behind the studio-window in Paris, — are simultaneously evasive and exact, far and near.

Xavier Valls' art resembles a sort of catharsis. Low-voiced, it causes to flow into us that peace of mind and mysterious release from tension which  also emanate from a domestic scene by Vermeer or Mompou's musica callada. It is pure gentleness and radiance. How are we to describe this world full of dreams and yet not lacking in sensuousness, in which things are living beings? This world, in which reality is a dream, and the dream becomes reality is an enchanted oasis amid the turmoil of our clamour and our maledictions. It is the world of poetry. And I well believe that its narre is Gentleness.

Vladimir Jankélévitch

1979