Painting happiness" exhibition - Valérie CRAUSAZ
from september 5 to october 15, 2024
Cultural space (CRD) at the Nîmes site
Opening: Thursday, September 5, 2024 at 6 p.m.
Perhaps what most explains the diversity of Valérie Crausaz's work is that she explores the consistency of matter, its thickness. This is why the artist does not limit herself to painting and drawing, but goes so far as to create huge canvases, gouaches on incised cardboard, using wire and papier-mâché: she plunges us into what she likes to call the "flesh of painting", what the latter is capable of giving as structure, as relief. Valérie Crausaz is equally ambitious in her use of printing techniques such as linocut. The artist works with shapes, using stencils she makes herself. It is the form that first enables her to render what she believes to be deep within herself, cutting it up, sometimes tearing it apart. The materials she uses vary, but Valérie Crausaz loves dense materials that remain raw even after they have been refined, such as beeswax, which she mixes with color pigments to create a very compact paste.
Perhaps this is the essence of her work, an endless discovery of creative possibilities, in the strongest sense of the word: the artist from Nîmes models, imagines, transforms, scratches and removes. Her hands give another dimension to the accidental material. Shapes emerge from their supports, colors come to life. In the end, it's this combination that gives her works their vibrancy, and allows us to come face-to-face with them.
