Studio of Val | Art of bronze | With Murano’s glass masters

With Murano’s glass masters

French sculptor Val - Valérie Goutard - in Murano glass master workshop with “Interplanétaire” with Sculptureval

Glass working in Murano

Tenth eonian initiative by Frédéric Morel (April 2020)

Val’s favorite medium was bronze. During her creative path, she tried to explore a few others but always returned to this material.
Besides that bronze charmed her with its ancestral and immutable character, she said that with it her creations shone better because the patina breathed into them a life of their own evolving over time through its natural oxidation.

It was during the year 2013 that I started to talk to her about glass after seeing in galleries in Hong Kong sculptures with this medium which had impressed me a lot. Val was not really convinced at the time, but she nevertheless discussed it informally with our friends Francesco and Ja Brancaccio who had been working for a long time with Italian glass masters.

Around mid-2015, Val had been working intensively on monumental creations in her studio for over a year when she told me that she really needed to step back and rest. We then decided to take a trip to Rome that neither she nor I knew. It was while preparing our voyage that our friends suggested that we take the opportunity to come and join them in Venice for them to bring Val to the workshop of master glassmakers in Murano whom they knew.
Before we left for Italy, I had sent them exhibition catalogs of Val’s work as well as some of her bronze figures. The head of the family, Enzo, was enthusiastic about it and the day we arrived on the island, he warmly welcomed Val into his workshop offering her to come back the next day to introduce her to the art of glass.
The spectacle of the ballet of canes of glassmakers perched with their balls of incandescent material going from the furnaces to the expert hands of the master and his apprentices, immediately triggered in her a flood of creativity, a multitude of questions, a vision of the possibilities and of sculptures to become. She already knew at that moment that she was not just going to make glass works but to grab this new medium to make it dance, unite it, glorify it with bronze. That day, Val knew what she was going to do with this material that would give materiality to the void and that was her stroke of genius.
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