Val

Chiefs and Spirits
Prinsestraat 49
2513CB Den Haag
Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 17hrs
info@chiefsandspirits.nl

Biography of VAL - Sculptor

VAL, a French artist, lived a nomadic childhood, shuttling between South America and Africa. If it is true that great artists have no homeland, it is this 40-year-old artist's membership in the human community that takes precedence over any specific nationality.

Living between Paris and Bangkok since 2004, VAL seems to have found true freedom in Asia, and this way of life in particular has given her wings.

For ten years, she was an urban professional, working in marketing while she had a fortuitous encounter that would change the course of her life forever.

The encounter was with clay, and it occurred at the home of an artist-friend who wanted to show Val, then around 30, a different way of life. The experience was such a revelation that the overwhelming passion she felt then has yet to subside. She literally returned to the earth, her arms buried in clay up the elbows, in touch with her senses becoming one with her material.

Self-taught and instinctual, she spent two years studying in Paris with an artist named Yanne Kintgen. During this time, she gained confidence in what her hands and mind could produce.

Val insists that she does not regret any technical or cultural shortcomings. Instead, she credits them with giving her creative freedom. As though formal knowledge would act as a brake or an impediment to her creative impulses. Knowledge can indeed be suffocating and the opposite of empowering if artists lack the courage to hold it at arm's length in order to reinject it into their work. This powerful impulse asserted itself the first few times she worked the clay as well as the desire to prolong the pleasure of creating forms out of nothing gradually drove her to cut all the ties that restrained her. VAL is fond of freedom. She has severed one by one the material, emotional and cultural bonds that prevent her from giving full expression to her need to create.

VAL gave herself five years to succeed. It took her only two to become independent and make a living out of her art. Her professional bonds were the first to be cut. She left her job as a marketing manager, bravely giving up the security of a generous salary to indulge her passion. Then she broke away from her geographical and cultural ties, leaving temporally France to open a sculpting studio in Bangkok, a bustling Asian metropolis where she has found inspiration and where everything seems possible. Since April 2004, when she does a first exhibition, VAL exhibits on a permanent basis her work from Asia to Europe in art galleries and international art fairs.

She first made a name for herself in April 2004, at a joint exhibition in Bangkok, and since 2005, her works have been on permanent display in Bangkok, then Hong Kong in 2006, Singapore and France in 2008 and then China in 2009. After several solo exhibitions in all those countries in 2010 and her noticed participation to the Shanghai Art Fair 2010 and at the Jing'An International Sculpture Project with the presentation of Urban Life monumental piece of art, VAL has now become a renowned sculptor in Asia and in Europe as well.

Her art is a symbol of her investigation into the nature of the human condition. She has rejected the punishment of a monotonous, empty and meaningless life. This is how she rebels against the absurdity of life. The proximity with the foundry in Thailand has proved to be the fertile soil that has nourished her new-found freedom. This rebirth of enthusiasm has enabled to find fulfillment in total peace and serenity. It is as if, here, everything was preordained, and all she needed to do was follow the signs and listen to the creative impulses within.

© Patricia Byrs-Lasquier Ph.D. in law and art history