Academic views
AN EXPLORATION OF INNER WORLDS
Sculpture has undergone such a revolution over the last few decades, or more particularly since the 1950s, both in how it is made and what it puts forward on a philosophical level, that we can no longer treat it as some poor relation and assign it a perpetually limited place.
As we have shifted from modernism to post-modernism, from an industrial society to a post-industrial society, and from the rise of social and critical thought to the collapse of ideologies, we have witnessed a fundamental questioning of the accepted idea of sculpture, with the development of all sorts of notions including the weird, the random and the ephemeral, alongside the use of new materials and methods, and a different concept of space.
While retaining her own artistic autonomy, Val was fully aware of all these changes and was conscious in the advances she made in her own work of the tribute she owed to her predecessors. Sculpture is no longer limited by the demands of commemorative statuary or the constraints of blocks and pedestals: it has shifted its focus away from planes and into space, building on its inherent connection with its surroundings and operating instead as a sign. Formalism has become mainstream, but there are many sculptors on the fringes who do not see form as sufficient in and of itself and who continue to hold that there should be a close connection with reality as well as with their chosen material. Through the issues they explore in their work, they reflect on man’s place in present-day society and at the same time question what the future holds. [ + ]
Val is one of these artists who share a belief in the abiding emotional power of the visual. From the very first she has produced highly stylised human figures whose meaning derives from all that she carries most deeply inside her. What she seeks to capture above all, as she stresses, however, are ‘moments’, moments caught from life, which she fixes in small, medium or large-scale open-framed bronze structures, and which reflect at once an instinct for order and a search for the absolute. For all the wit and energy she injects into the spindly figures she sets amid the commanding verticals of these imposing structures, Val does not seek to conceal an underlying sense of anxiety running through the attempts her figures make to commune, as she seeks to bring them together or at least into closer, brotherly contact. ‘To create is to open oneself up,’ she comments.
As has been made clear, contemporary sculptors have by no means abandoned the figure in their work, but they each approach it in their own specific way, according to their personal practice, medium and particular way of seeing. For Val, this consists of a blend of subtle lyricism and expressive force arrived at through multiple stages. First and foremost, she starts with clay, taking it up in her hand, feeling its weight and carefully measuring it out, and using it to form her underlying structure, then deliberately kneading and working it, stamping her imprint on its surface. This process is always governed by sensory impression rather than a slavish pursuit of likeness: mathematical calculation does not come into it, instead her shaping of form follows its own gradual and steady rhythm of development guided by her own instinctive logic. Her instinct is the product of long meditation on the meaning of form and the symbolism it conveys, through a sustained exploration and revisiting of a subject which is ever changing but constant, revolving as it does so fundamentally around human beings. There are always human figures: standing, in pairs or alone, held in place or dancing, still or balanced, sitting like Rodin’s Thinker, straddling an indeterminate structure, sleeping or in action, seen head-on, from behind, in profile. . . but rarely doing nothing. More often than not they are walking, and they are never left in total freedom: there is generally a metal structure enfolding them in its patinated rounded antler-like forms, as if to protect or simply shelter them, if not actually furnish them with a home. The detached geometry of these open structures made up of girders acts as a kind of stabiliser, making up for the unsteadiness of the protagonists, while evoking the rhythms of the urban fabric.
The setting is integral to the action, highlighting the slender figures whose bodies are sometimes as flat and smooth as coins and who always exhibit a desire for communication, one resting an arm on another’s shoulder, for instance, one body pressing up against another, one hand on another’s hand, walking side by side, brushing up against one another, but these gestures are always chaste and never become remotely carnal, because erotic images are not part of Val’s vocabulary. What is more, each character in the action is carefully finished, with no part of their faces or bodies left untouched. There is nothing systematic about this, it is just a visceral need on Val’s part to articulate her malaise by gouging into the clay in sweeping gestures which are akin to those of Germaine Richier. A proliferation of minute marks accompanies the bigger forms as her hand pushes and pulls at the clay, jabbing and smashing it alternately, creating crags and gashes, crevasses and chutes, lending the forms a distinctly dramatic feeling. This generates a sense of isolation, of individual and collective distress, of loneliness and helplessness. The fate of the world and the turmoil within it may cry out to her, but Val never voices or lets us see her pessimism: instead, her response is to gather her groups of human figures together, set her couples hand in hand, and present them with an unmoving ballet forged in metal, whose palpable momentum offers a more reassuring note.
These characters, the key actors in this two-sided performance, are never scattered randomly about, they are placed exactly where the artist chose to put them, right in the middle or on the edge of a set of structures arranged in a stabilising geometric formation, sheltering them. The structures sometimes form a trapezoidal shape and the figure is positioned at the lower end where it is in scale; others consist simply of a single larger square framework sheltering a couple on the side below, while other figures perch on a metal bar tracing out a dance.
Elsewhere there is a scaffolding tower in bronze pierced with aluminium, with the inevitable little protagonists, who also appear alongside other similar structures of the same kind, but thinner or fatter, and others still in a stepped formation, with tree-like forms on either side and a pair of caryatids supporting them.
Ever driven by a desire for change, Val also creates portico-shaped structures for her actors, surrounds them with rings and grids, and shows them intertwined, facing each other, back to back. In these areas, her imagination and technical mastery rule. The two work in tandem to conjure up fantastic cities, impossible towns where humankind in its smallness is set against the immensity of nature. A similar tension between nature and culture marks the steps in her career.
So, after a childhood and adolescence on the move, following in her family’s wake, how is it that Val opted for sculpture, when nothing in her background could have led one to predict it? How is it that she chose to face the mysteries and vagaries of art when a fulfilling professional life in Paris was the obvious choice? And, what is more, when everyone knows the terrible conditions most artists live in? Out of a taste for adventure, defiance, naivety, provocation, or over-confidence in herself? The reasons for her choice of vocation remain an enigma, but what is life without some risk?
Being an artist means a different way of life and for many it means moving to a different country, where one can reinvent oneself in the cocoon of anonymity and go on to make a name for oneself. And so Valérie Goutard took herself off far away to be reborn in art and became Val. Having spent her early years roaming across Europe, Africa and America, she cut her ties with her native country, gave up her wandering and settled on the one continent she had never lived in before, Asia, and more specifically, in Thailand. Before very long, she had acquired a spacious, comfortable, functional studio and soon enjoyed an enviable degree of success; she married Frédéric Morel, her earliest supporter, who helped her promote her work. She was ready for the future. She displayed a precocious talent, one that after just two years of training was clear not only to her but to the public who followed her.
After she settled in Bangkok she did continue to make the odd trip, primarily in the cause of sculpture, travelling to Venice, for instance, where she spent time as an apprentice learning about glass from the master glassmakers of Murano and developed her sense of colour by working with this thoroughly translucent and highly refractive material, but she always came back to Thailand and to the safe haven she had made for herself in her studio there. Her choice of country may seem strange or at least unusual, because admirers of Asian art tend in general to be drawn to China or to India rather than to the former Siam, which does not have a particularly strong stamp or aesthetic identity of its own.
The Thais originally came from the north, and, like their neighbours in large areas in the north, they have a tonal language and a Buddhist view of the world, although they practise the Hinayanist form of Buddhism followed in Indochina and Ceylon. The art of the kingdom is influenced by both Khmer and Burmese art and is delightfully hybrid, satisfying Western fantasies with a smiling face or a wonderful illusion of freedom.
Val‘s pieces are not primarily concerned with revealing a desire for freedom, however, but rather with questioning the world, exploring its strangeness. With this end in mind, she exploits the idea of accuracy, aware that it is no more than an exercise which succeeds in illustrating the inevitable relativity of perception. Her figures therefore take on a new appearance depending on the angle from which they are viewed, making it difficult to identify them as individuals, so that in the end they constitute a single undifferentiated human entity.
Be that as it may, and whatever the issues they may seek to explore, Val’s figures are her signature. Rather in the way a painter incorporates a tag somewhere in a corner of a canvas, she includes a little lost figure somewhere in a deceptively non-figurative space. She takes a structure which stands perfectly well on its own and adds a slender figure to it, upsetting our view of it and creating another reason for us to try and decipher its meaning.
The effect is akin to that Taoist-influenced landscape painting of the Middle Kingdom period, which stresses man’s humility in the face of the splendour of nature. Whether they appear at the foot of a series of misty mountains whose sugar-loaf masses merge with the clouds, or stand up to their ankles in water in paddy fields, the figures in the human tragicomedy these images depict are of necessity similarly small.
The difference is that this was in painting, which dominated sculpture, where monumentality was the order of the day and the focus was on a single being, in the shape of stone figures of Siddhartha Gautama, countless Buddhas and bodhisattvas carved out of the formidable cliff faces at Yungang, Longmen and many other sites, not least the largest of them all in the world, the near divine 70 metre tall Giant Buddha of Leshan.
Looking at the diminutive size of Val’s figures, one could almost talk in terms of sculptural Taoism if the environment these small figures inhabited was landscape. However, nature here has been replaced by metal structures which are quasi-abstract despite having concrete titles, albeit ones which are more suggestive of metaphor than of narrative. Given that reality is an illusion, no more than an idea that we make of it, mentioning something does not mean it will actually be shown, the places are allegorical and the titles cannot make the forms in these pieces totally figurative.
Invitation au théâtre, for example, is no more than a mishmash of metal squares, which are more suggestive of the shoring holding up a tunnel in a mine than of the racks on a theatre stage without wings. For the most part, it should be said, the titles do not claim anyway to describe utterly figurative environments but rather to capture atmospheres, feelings, silences, attitudes, encounters. . .
Val sets her figures in barren spaces made up of the barest of forms. She combines these non-figurative forms together to create twisted structures which come across alternately as playful, fantastic, austere or expressionistic. In the midst of these liminal spaces improbable figures appear, ‘tall dwarf women’, tiny little figures so thin, with such elongated limbs, that they look like something out of a surrealist anorexic fashion show, skinny giants who have stumbled into a wild world. They wander astonished, without any depth, through structures derived from some contemporary world, but reduced to abstract forms without meaning. Maybe they have escaped from another planet, unless of course Earth as we know it has been changed into another planet. But if works of art no longer represent anything, perhaps art is a reflection of the void?
For all this, as we have already observed, Val’s creatures do not necessarily display fear or despair, and there is nothing in their barely sketched faces, the eloquent springiness of their poses, their peaceful bearing, their dynamism or their inclination to interact with one another to suggest that there is any hint of conflict here. Even when they appear to be venturing onto the edge of a precipice or to be stepping out onto a high wire, these thin tightrope walkers seem free and graceful, and do not exhibit any undue anxiety, but rather a kind of lofty gravity, if not distance or reserve.
Val is known to have had an affinity with Moore and Matisse, which is understandable since they both depicted the body in movement, and this takes us on naturally to the Swiss Giacometti who spent his life striving to pin down reality, going over every gesture and look minutely over and over again.
With their beaten bronze look, profiles of burnt giants or tortured escapees with their skin in shreds and flesh peeling in patches, the first human forms Val forged certainly had much in common with the famous Walking Man which Giacometti made in 1960, which followed The Forest of 1950 which already looked as though it was the aftermath of a fire, with nothing left standing but charred trunks.
Giacometti’s Walking Man is slender like Val’s figures, but unlike hers, has his arms hanging down by the sides of his body, inert, with nothing in his hands, his eyes are not fixed on any horizon and he is not looking for a companion. The surface texture of this very well-known work compounds the sense of heaviness projected by the gaunt, expressionless man, walking nowhere, carrying the unbelievable weight of a lost world on his shoulders.
Because there is no visible setting, his condition shouts out destruction and the emptiness brought by the horror of the war. The Walking Man is a figure out of a death camp, walking away from a continent flattened by bombs or a town blown to pieces. But horror is a fate that cannot be escaped. Misery sticks to the soles of our memory. We are always either too close or too removed from others and, as writer Daniel Sibony says, ‘contemporary art seeks to bring us right up close to the distant lives we carry within us but can no longer see, so that we can appreciate their grain and texture from a proper distance.’
Given the difference in the poses, attitudes and modelling of their subjects, his motionless and distant, hers full of movement, and in their focus, his on the individual, hers on a desire for interaction, Val has not sought to replicate or reinvent Giacometti’s Man, but she has obviously not been able to ignore it either, while nevertheless remaining mistress of her own arsenal. Whether it be by chance or otherwise, her figures are peripherally descended from this ancestor, they are the children of this survivor figure, the inheritors of a world in ruins. But that world is nowhere to be seen in her work, or perhaps it has been reconstructed in the light of her vision.
Fully in command of her craft, with a clear sense of her own intent and artistic purpose, backed up by a strength of character, Val sets her spindly family in a new world, made up of various materials. She discovered that she wanted to take up sculpture by working with clay, taking up handfuls of it as a primary material and working it tentatively, attacking it in different ways, respecting its rhythm while imposing her own. Subsequently she turned to other materials, notably combining her burnt bronze forms with others made of glass, revelling in the coloured transparency of the material and its sometimes smooth, sometimes undulating surface and treating its enveloping light as a form in itself. But gradually the same small-scale figures began to appear within these translucent masses, stiff with inlaid droplets and fragments of colour, standing upright, slightly bent or sitting, sometimes surrounded by a ring of bronze. ‘The existence of the bronze worlds reinforces the mystery of the worlds in glass. The light and the shadows illustrate the multiplicity of perceptible realities, and all of the materials have a trompe l’oeil, illusionist quality. They suggest a labyrinth where reference points disappear.’ Other glass pieces are made up of steps with figures either on the inside or the outside, and a mini story starts to unfold, because every composition has its own story. To force them together and initiate an interaction or bring it to a close, Val deliberately sets some figures facing others encased in blocks, like ancient prehistoric fossils imprisoned in amber concretions. Elsewhere she leaves it to their instinct to guide them towards one another.
One of these pieces, made in 2016, is called Chat between two worlds, implying the possibility of having a conversation across time between the present and some distant era associated with paleoanthropology, or perhaps a more recent period, but one which has been vitrified in the way that we treat the most dangerous nuclear waste.
Beneath its light exterior, the universe Val constructs perhaps hints at a hidden heaviness and the figures she introduces are perhaps a clever way of setting up a series of questions. It is worth thinking back at this point to the competitions organised in the nineteenth century by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, for the award of lucrative public commissions. Candidates could submit work of various categories including historical and mythological subjects, but not landscape. If they wanted to put in pictures of nature, they had to include the odd figure or two and give them the names of historical figures or of Greek and Roman deities so that they qualified for submission under one of the set themes.
These days such official classifications no longer apply, artists have given up purely representational art and no longer have to include human figures in their works to get them accepted. A number of painters choose nonetheless to include figures in the middle of works which are otherwise not remotely representational, as if the sweeps and swirls of the compositions reflect the colour and movement of the emotions driving the faces they surround.
Considered in this light, despite the gravity and somewhat melancholy tendency we have already discussed of the impassive figures in Val’s pieces, the overall mood remains one of qualified optimism in which a hope of happiness does not preclude deep inner meditation, and there is recognition that happiness is not something one lives, but something one remembers.
However, it is the combination of the lively, often playful atmospheres she creates and the architectonic rigour of the settings which suggests what the pieces are about. Caught in the middle of unacted desires and unspoken fantasies, the actors in her story are anything but aggressive but come across rather as benevolent, on the edge of an interrupted daydream. But it is above all the intensity of Val’s inner vision which gives her work its enduring quality. As Arnaud Dubus has aptly put it, Val sees man as ‘a man without a face, because he is a man in a crowd, everyman, a generic being who has transcended all individual outward appearance and embodies the essence of all feeling in his deep humanity’.
There is no doubt that what we have here, over and above the formal strengths which underpin it, is a reflection on man and his suffering condition, and it is this which gives it its enduring value. As for Val’s physical handling of her material, her minute, rhythmic pushing and pulling it into shape, it is neither unbridled nor completely controlled, it is simply a compromise which follows her intuitive sense of what is right.
Now, there is a persistent compulsion to want to classify an artist’s œuvre, to fit it into an appropriate historic and aesthetic slot, to consign it in brief for evermore to a particular category, and furthermore it is a historian’s job to classify, to order. This is no easy matter when it comes to Val. Her visual language is marked by different elements which she often puts together: on one hand her work has a measured lyricism to it, while on the other it has a geometric quality bordering on minimalism. On top of this, it is powerfully expressive and the whole thing turns on a reality which she pursues relentlessly as hard as she can. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a broad term which could aptly be applied to her, given her readiness to put different materials together, and that is the word assembler. Dubuffet coined the term assemblage in 1953 to refer to the small-scale works he made with found materials. The dividing line between construction and assemblage is a fine one, but as soon as a work takes different materials and mixes them together effectively, it acquires a new status, and if on top of this it highlights the difference between the smallness of humankind and the immensity of nature it more than earns its place in the ranks of the defining trends of contemporary art.
At the same time it is important to remember that Val is a polymorphous artist, not afraid to change scale and to branch out in a new direction and take up monumental art. She dismissed museums as elitist and sought to make art accessible to the greatest number by making public art in Taiwan, where she created a spectacular long undulating metal structure overlooking Taichung, and more particularly in Thailand, where she planted her tall, proud bronze figures into the seabed by the island of Koh Tao to be buffeted by the dark swirling waters. This extraordinary turbulent interaction between art and the elements could hardly fail to be striking.
Gone far too soon, at the height of her career, shown all over Asia and the object of almost immediate recognition, Val leaves behind her a coherent and inventive body of work into which she put her entire being. The mini-narratives which she captured in bronze or glass also tell her story.
Gérard Xuriguera
AN EXPLORATION OF INNER WORLDS
Sculpture has undergone such a revolution over the last few decades, or more particularly since the 1950s, both in how it is made and what it puts forward on a philosophical level, that we can no longer treat it as some poor relation and assign it a perpetually limited place.
As we have shifted from modernism to post-modernism, from an industrial society to a post-industrial society, and from the rise of social and critical thought to the collapse of ideologies, we have witnessed a fundamental questioning of the accepted idea of sculpture, with the development of all sorts of notions including the weird, the random and the ephemeral, alongside the use of new materials and methods, and a different concept of space.
While retaining her own artistic autonomy, Val was fully aware of all these changes and was conscious in the advances she made in her own work of the tribute she owed to her predecessors. Sculpture is no longer limited by the demands of commemorative statuary or the constraints of blocks and pedestals: it has shifted its focus away from planes and into space, building on its inherent connection with its surroundings and operating instead as a sign. Formalism has become mainstream, but there are many sculptors on the fringes who do not see form as sufficient in and of itself and who continue to hold that there should be a close connection with reality as well as with their chosen material. Through the issues they explore in their work, they reflect on man’s place in present-day society and at the same time question what the future holds. [ + ]
Val is one of these artists who share a belief in the abiding emotional power of the visual. From the very first she has produced highly stylised human figures whose meaning derives from all that she carries most deeply inside her. What she seeks to capture above all, as she stresses, however, are ‘moments’, moments caught from life, which she fixes in small, medium or large-scale open-framed bronze structures, and which reflect at once an instinct for order and a search for the absolute. For all the wit and energy she injects into the spindly figures she sets amid the commanding verticals of these imposing structures, Val does not seek to conceal an underlying sense of anxiety running through the attempts her figures make to commune, as she seeks to bring them together or at least into closer, brotherly contact. ‘To create is to open oneself up,’ she comments.
As has been made clear, contemporary sculptors have by no means abandoned the figure in their work, but they each approach it in their own specific way, according to their personal practice, medium and particular way of seeing. For Val, this consists of a blend of subtle lyricism and expressive force arrived at through multiple stages. First and foremost, she starts with clay, taking it up in her hand, feeling its weight and carefully measuring it out, and using it to form her underlying structure, then deliberately kneading and working it, stamping her imprint on its surface. This process is always governed by sensory impression rather than a slavish pursuit of likeness: mathematical calculation does not come into it, instead her shaping of form follows its own gradual and steady rhythm of development guided by her own instinctive logic. Her instinct is the product of long meditation on the meaning of form and the symbolism it conveys, through a sustained exploration and revisiting of a subject which is ever changing but constant, revolving as it does so fundamentally around human beings. There are always human figures: standing, in pairs or alone, held in place or dancing, still or balanced, sitting like Rodin’s Thinker, straddling an indeterminate structure, sleeping or in action, seen head-on, from behind, in profile. . . but rarely doing nothing. More often than not they are walking, and they are never left in total freedom: there is generally a metal structure enfolding them in its patinated rounded antler-like forms, as if to protect or simply shelter them, if not actually furnish them with a home. The detached geometry of these open structures made up of girders acts as a kind of stabiliser, making up for the unsteadiness of the protagonists, while evoking the rhythms of the urban fabric.
The setting is integral to the action, highlighting the slender figures whose bodies are sometimes as flat and smooth as coins and who always exhibit a desire for communication, one resting an arm on another’s shoulder, for instance, one body pressing up against another, one hand on another’s hand, walking side by side, brushing up against one another, but these gestures are always chaste and never become remotely carnal, because erotic images are not part of Val’s vocabulary. What is more, each character in the action is carefully finished, with no part of their faces or bodies left untouched. There is nothing systematic about this, it is just a visceral need on Val’s part to articulate her malaise by gouging into the clay in sweeping gestures which are akin to those of Germaine Richier. A proliferation of minute marks accompanies the bigger forms as her hand pushes and pulls at the clay, jabbing and smashing it alternately, creating crags and gashes, crevasses and chutes, lending the forms a distinctly dramatic feeling. This generates a sense of isolation, of individual and collective distress, of loneliness and helplessness. The fate of the world and the turmoil within it may cry out to her, but Val never voices or lets us see her pessimism: instead, her response is to gather her groups of human figures together, set her couples hand in hand, and present them with an unmoving ballet forged in metal, whose palpable momentum offers a more reassuring note.
These characters, the key actors in this two-sided performance, are never scattered randomly about, they are placed exactly where the artist chose to put them, right in the middle or on the edge of a set of structures arranged in a stabilising geometric formation, sheltering them. The structures sometimes form a trapezoidal shape and the figure is positioned at the lower end where it is in scale; others consist simply of a single larger square framework sheltering a couple on the side below, while other figures perch on a metal bar tracing out a dance.
Elsewhere there is a scaffolding tower in bronze pierced with aluminium, with the inevitable little protagonists, who also appear alongside other similar structures of the same kind, but thinner or fatter, and others still in a stepped formation, with tree-like forms on either side and a pair of caryatids supporting them.
Ever driven by a desire for change, Val also creates portico-shaped structures for her actors, surrounds them with rings and grids, and shows them intertwined, facing each other, back to back. In these areas, her imagination and technical mastery rule. The two work in tandem to conjure up fantastic cities, impossible towns where humankind in its smallness is set against the immensity of nature. A similar tension between nature and culture marks the steps in her career.
So, after a childhood and adolescence on the move, following in her family’s wake, how is it that Val opted for sculpture, when nothing in her background could have led one to predict it? How is it that she chose to face the mysteries and vagaries of art when a fulfilling professional life in Paris was the obvious choice? And, what is more, when everyone knows the terrible conditions most artists live in? Out of a taste for adventure, defiance, naivety, provocation, or over-confidence in herself? The reasons for her choice of vocation remain an enigma, but what is life without some risk?
Being an artist means a different way of life and for many it means moving to a different country, where one can reinvent oneself in the cocoon of anonymity and go on to make a name for oneself. And so Valérie Goutard took herself off far away to be reborn in art and became Val. Having spent her early years roaming across Europe, Africa and America, she cut her ties with her native country, gave up her wandering and settled on the one continent she had never lived in before, Asia, and more specifically, in Thailand. Before very long, she had acquired a spacious, comfortable, functional studio and soon enjoyed an enviable degree of success; she married Frédéric Morel, her earliest supporter, who helped her promote her work. She was ready for the future. She displayed a precocious talent, one that after just two years of training was clear not only to her but to the public who followed her.
After she settled in Bangkok she did continue to make the odd trip, primarily in the cause of sculpture, travelling to Venice, for instance, where she spent time as an apprentice learning about glass from the master glassmakers of Murano and developed her sense of colour by working with this thoroughly translucent and highly refractive material, but she always came back to Thailand and to the safe haven she had made for herself in her studio there. Her choice of country may seem strange or at least unusual, because admirers of Asian art tend in general to be drawn to China or to India rather than to the former Siam, which does not have a particularly strong stamp or aesthetic identity of its own.
The Thais originally came from the north, and, like their neighbours in large areas in the north, they have a tonal language and a Buddhist view of the world, although they practise the Hinayanist form of Buddhism followed in Indochina and Ceylon. The art of the kingdom is influenced by both Khmer and Burmese art and is delightfully hybrid, satisfying Western fantasies with a smiling face or a wonderful illusion of freedom.
Val‘s pieces are not primarily concerned with revealing a desire for freedom, however, but rather with questioning the world, exploring its strangeness. With this end in mind, she exploits the idea of accuracy, aware that it is no more than an exercise which succeeds in illustrating the inevitable relativity of perception. Her figures therefore take on a new appearance depending on the angle from which they are viewed, making it difficult to identify them as individuals, so that in the end they constitute a single undifferentiated human entity.
Be that as it may, and whatever the issues they may seek to explore, Val’s figures are her signature. Rather in the way a painter incorporates a tag somewhere in a corner of a canvas, she includes a little lost figure somewhere in a deceptively non-figurative space. She takes a structure which stands perfectly well on its own and adds a slender figure to it, upsetting our view of it and creating another reason for us to try and decipher its meaning.
The effect is akin to that Taoist-influenced landscape painting of the Middle Kingdom period, which stresses man’s humility in the face of the splendour of nature. Whether they appear at the foot of a series of misty mountains whose sugar-loaf masses merge with the clouds, or stand up to their ankles in water in paddy fields, the figures in the human tragicomedy these images depict are of necessity similarly small.
The difference is that this was in painting, which dominated sculpture, where monumentality was the order of the day and the focus was on a single being, in the shape of stone figures of Siddhartha Gautama, countless Buddhas and bodhisattvas carved out of the formidable cliff faces at Yungang, Longmen and many other sites, not least the largest of them all in the world, the near divine 70 metre tall Giant Buddha of Leshan.
Looking at the diminutive size of Val’s figures, one could almost talk in terms of sculptural Taoism if the environment these small figures inhabited was landscape. However, nature here has been replaced by metal structures which are quasi-abstract despite having concrete titles, albeit ones which are more suggestive of metaphor than of narrative. Given that reality is an illusion, no more than an idea that we make of it, mentioning something does not mean it will actually be shown, the places are allegorical and the titles cannot make the forms in these pieces totally figurative.
Invitation au théâtre, for example, is no more than a mishmash of metal squares, which are more suggestive of the shoring holding up a tunnel in a mine than of the racks on a theatre stage without wings. For the most part, it should be said, the titles do not claim anyway to describe utterly figurative environments but rather to capture atmospheres, feelings, silences, attitudes, encounters. . .
Val sets her figures in barren spaces made up of the barest of forms. She combines these non-figurative forms together to create twisted structures which come across alternately as playful, fantastic, austere or expressionistic. In the midst of these liminal spaces improbable figures appear, ‘tall dwarf women’, tiny little figures so thin, with such elongated limbs, that they look like something out of a surrealist anorexic fashion show, skinny giants who have stumbled into a wild world. They wander astonished, without any depth, through structures derived from some contemporary world, but reduced to abstract forms without meaning. Maybe they have escaped from another planet, unless of course Earth as we know it has been changed into another planet. But if works of art no longer represent anything, perhaps art is a reflection of the void?
For all this, as we have already observed, Val’s creatures do not necessarily display fear or despair, and there is nothing in their barely sketched faces, the eloquent springiness of their poses, their peaceful bearing, their dynamism or their inclination to interact with one another to suggest that there is any hint of conflict here. Even when they appear to be venturing onto the edge of a precipice or to be stepping out onto a high wire, these thin tightrope walkers seem free and graceful, and do not exhibit any undue anxiety, but rather a kind of lofty gravity, if not distance or reserve.
Val is known to have had an affinity with Moore and Matisse, which is understandable since they both depicted the body in movement, and this takes us on naturally to the Swiss Giacometti who spent his life striving to pin down reality, going over every gesture and look minutely over and over again.
With their beaten bronze look, profiles of burnt giants or tortured escapees with their skin in shreds and flesh peeling in patches, the first human forms Val forged certainly had much in common with the famous Walking Man which Giacometti made in 1960, which followed The Forest of 1950 which already looked as though it was the aftermath of a fire, with nothing left standing but charred trunks.
Giacometti’s Walking Man is slender like Val’s figures, but unlike hers, has his arms hanging down by the sides of his body, inert, with nothing in his hands, his eyes are not fixed on any horizon and he is not looking for a companion. The surface texture of this very well-known work compounds the sense of heaviness projected by the gaunt, expressionless man, walking nowhere, carrying the unbelievable weight of a lost world on his shoulders.
Because there is no visible setting, his condition shouts out destruction and the emptiness brought by the horror of the war. The Walking Man is a figure out of a death camp, walking away from a continent flattened by bombs or a town blown to pieces. But horror is a fate that cannot be escaped. Misery sticks to the soles of our memory. We are always either too close or too removed from others and, as writer Daniel Sibony says, ‘contemporary art seeks to bring us right up close to the distant lives we carry within us but can no longer see, so that we can appreciate their grain and texture from a proper distance.’
Given the difference in the poses, attitudes and modelling of their subjects, his motionless and distant, hers full of movement, and in their focus, his on the individual, hers on a desire for interaction, Val has not sought to replicate or reinvent Giacometti’s Man, but she has obviously not been able to ignore it either, while nevertheless remaining mistress of her own arsenal. Whether it be by chance or otherwise, her figures are peripherally descended from this ancestor, they are the children of this survivor figure, the inheritors of a world in ruins. But that world is nowhere to be seen in her work, or perhaps it has been reconstructed in the light of her vision.
Fully in command of her craft, with a clear sense of her own intent and artistic purpose, backed up by a strength of character, Val sets her spindly family in a new world, made up of various materials. She discovered that she wanted to take up sculpture by working with clay, taking up handfuls of it as a primary material and working it tentatively, attacking it in different ways, respecting its rhythm while imposing her own. Subsequently she turned to other materials, notably combining her burnt bronze forms with others made of glass, revelling in the coloured transparency of the material and its sometimes smooth, sometimes undulating surface and treating its enveloping light as a form in itself. But gradually the same small-scale figures began to appear within these translucent masses, stiff with inlaid droplets and fragments of colour, standing upright, slightly bent or sitting, sometimes surrounded by a ring of bronze. ‘The existence of the bronze worlds reinforces the mystery of the worlds in glass. The light and the shadows illustrate the multiplicity of perceptible realities, and all of the materials have a trompe l’oeil, illusionist quality. They suggest a labyrinth where reference points disappear.’ Other glass pieces are made up of steps with figures either on the inside or the outside, and a mini story starts to unfold, because every composition has its own story. To force them together and initiate an interaction or bring it to a close, Val deliberately sets some figures facing others encased in blocks, like ancient prehistoric fossils imprisoned in amber concretions. Elsewhere she leaves it to their instinct to guide them towards one another.
One of these pieces, made in 2016, is called Chat between two worlds, implying the possibility of having a conversation across time between the present and some distant era associated with paleoanthropology, or perhaps a more recent period, but one which has been vitrified in the way that we treat the most dangerous nuclear waste.
Beneath its light exterior, the universe Val constructs perhaps hints at a hidden heaviness and the figures she introduces are perhaps a clever way of setting up a series of questions. It is worth thinking back at this point to the competitions organised in the nineteenth century by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, for the award of lucrative public commissions. Candidates could submit work of various categories including historical and mythological subjects, but not landscape. If they wanted to put in pictures of nature, they had to include the odd figure or two and give them the names of historical figures or of Greek and Roman deities so that they qualified for submission under one of the set themes.
These days such official classifications no longer apply, artists have given up purely representational art and no longer have to include human figures in their works to get them accepted. A number of painters choose nonetheless to include figures in the middle of works which are otherwise not remotely representational, as if the sweeps and swirls of the compositions reflect the colour and movement of the emotions driving the faces they surround.
Considered in this light, despite the gravity and somewhat melancholy tendency we have already discussed of the impassive figures in Val’s pieces, the overall mood remains one of qualified optimism in which a hope of happiness does not preclude deep inner meditation, and there is recognition that happiness is not something one lives, but something one remembers.
However, it is the combination of the lively, often playful atmospheres she creates and the architectonic rigour of the settings which suggests what the pieces are about. Caught in the middle of unacted desires and unspoken fantasies, the actors in her story are anything but aggressive but come across rather as benevolent, on the edge of an interrupted daydream. But it is above all the intensity of Val’s inner vision which gives her work its enduring quality. As Arnaud Dubus has aptly put it, Val sees man as ‘a man without a face, because he is a man in a crowd, everyman, a generic being who has transcended all individual outward appearance and embodies the essence of all feeling in his deep humanity’.
There is no doubt that what we have here, over and above the formal strengths which underpin it, is a reflection on man and his suffering condition, and it is this which gives it its enduring value. As for Val’s physical handling of her material, her minute, rhythmic pushing and pulling it into shape, it is neither unbridled nor completely controlled, it is simply a compromise which follows her intuitive sense of what is right.
Now, there is a persistent compulsion to want to classify an artist’s œuvre, to fit it into an appropriate historic and aesthetic slot, to consign it in brief for evermore to a particular category, and furthermore it is a historian’s job to classify, to order. This is no easy matter when it comes to Val. Her visual language is marked by different elements which she often puts together: on one hand her work has a measured lyricism to it, while on the other it has a geometric quality bordering on minimalism. On top of this, it is powerfully expressive and the whole thing turns on a reality which she pursues relentlessly as hard as she can. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a broad term which could aptly be applied to her, given her readiness to put different materials together, and that is the word assembler. Dubuffet coined the term assemblage in 1953 to refer to the small-scale works he made with found materials. The dividing line between construction and assemblage is a fine one, but as soon as a work takes different materials and mixes them together effectively, it acquires a new status, and if on top of this it highlights the difference between the smallness of humankind and the immensity of nature it more than earns its place in the ranks of the defining trends of contemporary art.
At the same time it is important to remember that Val is a polymorphous artist, not afraid to change scale and to branch out in a new direction and take up monumental art. She dismissed museums as elitist and sought to make art accessible to the greatest number by making public art in Taiwan, where she created a spectacular long undulating metal structure overlooking Taichung, and more particularly in Thailand, where she planted her tall, proud bronze figures into the seabed by the island of Koh Tao to be buffeted by the dark swirling waters. This extraordinary turbulent interaction between art and the elements could hardly fail to be striking.
Gone far too soon, at the height of her career, shown all over Asia and the object of almost immediate recognition, Val leaves behind her a coherent and inventive body of work into which she put her entire being. The mini-narratives which she captured in bronze or glass also tell her story.
Gérard Xuriguera
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