Valérie Favre




Valérie Favre, Flugübung mit Storch, Oil on canvas, 130 x 170 cm, 2001


November 16, 2001 - January 20, 2002

 

Valérie Favre (Born, 1959 in Switzerland) lived in Paris in the 1980s and ‘90s and moved to Berlin in 1998.

Her first solo exhibition in Berlin is composed of a group of new paintings in which the artist challenges the mythology of flying. Titles such as "Pegasus" or "Ikarus" are chapters in an image-cosmos in which Valérie Favre achieves the narrative density of a novel. Like an author, she leads the brush and creates dramatic landscapes in whose ensemble strikingly odd figures appear. Feminine, androgynous and animal figures, heads and torsos, "saints" and " lapine universes" seem to have taken flight from places far from reality in shared movements of voyaging. They are reaching for the weightlessness of pictorial space, a blending of classical landscape painting touched with the tendencies of Watteau or Rembrandt in which Baroque facades and the scenarios from fantasy computer games find a role in its topographical schematic patterning.

 

With allegorical images both "open” and complex, Valérie Favre seems to advance on the anecdotal treasure of art history to which the painter’s envy of the narrative power of cinema, theatre and literature belongs their temporal nature. A hybrid web of narrations provoke an expanded depth of field of the observation time owing to the simultaneousness of both abstract and figurative vocabularies. The discursive and exhaustive medium of painting serves to focus the painter, with as much sincerity as humour, upon a specific narrative wealth which finds its essential nature in the singular imaginary worlds of the author. Instead of enriching the contemporary revival of stylised individualism, Valérie Favre locates her painting more classically within popular archetypes such as current mainstream narratives. Painting as a B-Movie.