SingartThe Music of Val’s Art
Val’s “La Traversee”. Photo credit: Red Sea Gallery Singapore.
Valerie Guotard Andrianoff, or Val, sets about shaping each new piece of sculpture instinctively, meditatively listening to a symphony of internal music. And it is ‘only later that (she) can rationalize what it means and how it has come about’.
The melodies flowing from her fertile mind intuitively guide this French artist’s nimble hands to emotively translate her sophisticated instincts, expansive emotions and a vibrant library of memories into a signature style that sublimely combines minimalist figures of people with cutting edge architecture that has been par down to skeletal, and yet aesthetically pleasing, platforms and frames.
The crescendo created is a flirtation with fragility and balance that ensures a ‘flow between the spaces and the sculpture’. So when it came to the larger dimensions of her “Inle Balance II”, Val meditatively knew the natural balance would change and to prevent the piece from becoming too oppressive, she gamely changed its weight and point of tilt.
To Val, her art works wax lyrical about ‘the relationship between us, as individuals, and the world around us; emphasizing the lack of intimacy and warmth in the crowded urban life in which we live’.
They dolefully whistle ‘an oppressive feeling of loneliness’ that unfortunately arises from the ‘isolation of one neighbour from another’ – even when they do appear together, they rarely speak to one another. And when they do, it is ‘often something sadly sentimental’.
Yet, she has so successfully frozen time and removed the context from her human figures that admirers of her work can be set free to dwell on her artwork; bringing in their own paradigms to reflect on the human condition. And, thus, adding their own song to a growing chorus of voices.
At the same time, Val often does not complete her bronzes in just one movement: “Ville Fantastique” and “Le Toit du Monde” are created to be ‘stories about life’. So each ‘starts with a piece of architecture with a character, or a couple… in a single moment in time… But put the pieces of the sculpture together and the architecture becomes a landscape (and so) the story base… and the characters take on a new perspective with movement and interaction between one another’.
This melodiously transforms the dancing couple in “Ville Fantastique” from a roof setting, for all the world to see, to a seductive tango in a room, both oblivious to everything else around them but the fun they are having. This, in turn, changes its unsuspecting viewers into voyeurs, ‘looking through a window at them, catching a private hidden moment’.
Then there are times when Val views all her work as a whole: she just cannot separate one work of art from another as the moment she adds the finishing flourishes on one bronze, it immediately fuels her imagination in unsung ways that will lead to the creation of yet another masterpiece.
Not surprisingly then that she looked at the characters in “Ville Fantastique” and found herself exploring them further – asking what it was that gave them their attitude. This brought forth her instinct to add more parts to it while putting it back on the horizontal plane. The end result is “Le Toit du Monde”.
This ‘sculptural jigsaw story of reason’ is a new technique that is ‘believed to be the first in the sculpting world’!
When she does orchestrate a bronze in just one movement, and she casts 12 from the same waxy mould, each soon gracefully sways to a different waltz, becoming ‘a work of art in their own right’ – Val has unfailingly applied her maestro’s touch on each individually!
In all these instances, what set her fingers to the tune of the piper are her feelings, with the external world providing the motifs of stimulation. And they are brought forth into a spritely dance by literature and theatre on everything regarding humanity in all its strengths and weaknesses, its depths of anxiety and heights of happiness, and its unquenchable propensity to question life.
The places she visits jazzes up her creative imagination too. Lake Inle in Myanmar was just one such a magical place: while on her honeymoon there, Val became captivated by the sturdy movements of a man guiding his boat across this large body of tranquil waters. This delightful memory she transformed into her “Inle Balance”, delicately freezing in a moment in time the boatman’s skill at maneuvering his produce-laden vessel.
By now, you may mistakenly think that Val was an artistic child prodigy in the likes of Mozart. Well, the music flowing from her infinitely fluid mind to her eager hands was only unleashed when her dexterous fingers worked with pliable clay for the first time in 2001 – well after her birth in 1967.
This chance encounter at an artist friend’s house in Paris stoked the lyrical flames smoldering unconsciously within into a burning passion – one that shifted this French woman from the comfortable world of advertising to that of a bohemian life in Bangkok as a globally successful sculptress.
Hum to the music Val is playing with her latest sculptures at Red Sea Gallery Singapore, Block 9 Dempsey Road, #01-10 Dempsey Hill, Singapore 247697.
