Valérie Favre: Visions

Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, Switzerland

Valérie Favre has assembled a bizarre troupe of she-bunnies, little girls, so-called ‘idiots’, cockroaches seen under a magnifying glass, Füssli’s three witches, an actual Secret Service for the Queen (the title of one of her pictures), to develop enigmatic stories in her mostly large-format paintings. ‘Basically,’ the artist said recently, ‘I keep writing the same novel.’ It plays out between deserted car parks and Grimm-like fairy-tale forests, and moves along the ridge that separates the big emotions from the latent absurdity of the world, always aware of the abyss of everyday madness.