Valérie Favre: La Première Nuit du mondeMusée d'art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France
Valérie Favre questions the possibilities and limits of painting, developing a body of work that includes both figuration and abstraction, large panoramic formats and numerous variations on intimate formats. Insects, plants, parades populated by imaginary creatures, famous suicides, thus inhabit the canvases of the artist who willingly draws his subjects from literature and art history, while reserving moments where painting is worth for itself, where forms emerge from the material and color. Her work develops essentially in series, which she nourishes for many years, sometimes decades.
Valérie Favre returns to Strasbourg with an exhibition conceived around her latest work, a tribute to Maurice Blanchot inspired by her reading of Thomas l'obscur. Fascinated by this strange story, the artist undertook to copy the book meticulously and to illustrate it with ink and watercolor drawings. The catalog was also influenced by this: not only is its format the same as the pages copied by the artist, but it presents a facsimile of 48 pages of the work. Around Thomas l'Obscur, both in the exhibition and in the catalog, six series are displayed, representative of the multiple paths explored by the artist: "Fragments", close to Victor Hugo's ink drawings, "Ghosts", inspired by Goya's Flight of the Witches, "Balls and Tunnels", a true ode to chance, as well as "The Little Theaters of Life", collages and ink drawings where the multiple references to the history of art and literature but also to the contemporary world that nourish Valerie Favre's artistic universe meet.
Curator: Estelle Pietrzyk
