“I am wrapped in a mantle which is a protective shell in which I was formed in the world. Many women (the list goes on) have helped and guided me along their paths and their choices to evolve. The fabric is inscribed with hundreds of names of female artists and goddesses. This coat represents the symbol of my necessarily unfinished development I am trying to represent what influences my life and to define who I am, a person in the process of becoming, facing the demise of the world”. (Valerie Favre)
Valérie Favre is an artist who is primarily concerned with painting itself. She deals with this in series of works, in each of which she plays through a theme. The artist draws the subjects of her figurative paintings and works on paper from her own imagination and inner world, as well as from the wide range of art, literature and philosophy.
In the space we see three examples of works which are central aspects in the artist’s creation:
Valérie Favre’s new series of paintings “Bateau des poètes” is in keeping with her previous works (in particular with her series “Fragments” from 2012). The works of Valérie Favre create, collectively, a system that is their own.
Thought of as an homage, this new series by Valérie Favre brings together on ships, sailing in the darkness of the night or the sky, the great literary figures who shaped both her life and her practice. It refers as much to intellectual journeys as it does to migration or the last voyage, the one leading to death. While some of these paintings feel abstract, others are more figurative. By means of collage, one can see, on the vessels the bright faces of the poets Sylvia Plath and Georg Trackl but also the artists Ana Mendieta and Diane Arbus, to name but a few. All figures who have reflected on the place of art in life, through poetic, anarchic or absurd processes: Art as a way to survive, as a way of life that allows us to think about alternatives.
In “Bateau des poètes” we are reminded of the freedom with which Favre likes to travel from one medium to another: from tempera to oil or pastel, from the surface of the canvas to collages. Her creative process resembles that of the poets she portrays in her paintings: piecing together words with no obvious connection to form, at the end, a beautiful image.
In the „Balls and Tunnels“ series, an abstract work is also created every year – a procedure that Favre intends to continue until the end of her life.
Year after year, new pictures emerge form out of the artist´s paint and studio grime-filled bathtub. She places the big banging formation of the universe in contrast to the mythology of painterly creation: Without any use pf perspective, but with countless partial focal points, a randomly gathered pictural cosmology with extravagant vastness is formed from out of nothing other than a few colours and an old rag that has been duked, drowned, wrung, sullied and maltreated in a number of other ways. The stormy pandemonium of colours, their distances and proximities, becomes a metaphorical testimony, an image for each lived year.
An Angel, (Is it an angel of annunciation, or a fallen angel?) is guarding the entrance of the gallery space.
Valerie Favre has also worked on a male pendant to the coat of female heroines. It is covered in mirrored nameplates of warriors of the Trojan war.
