Valérie Besson

For the 2017 - 2018 holiday season, the Salon Vert will welcome an exhibition of recent work by the Geneva artist Valérie Besson.

Valérie Besson lives and works in Geneva. After studying engraving at the Cambre in Brussels and then receiving her degree in art/media at the HEAD in Geneva, Valérie Besson now primarily specializes in black and white, using different techniques: photography, engraving, paper cut-outs, ink...

She works on bringing back to life inanimate objects and antique techniques. She then modernizes the subject, like in her "mouchoirs de dragues", in which feminism and seduction form a whole, or in her paper cut-outs in which the understanding. She re-animates bones meant to be thrown away, transforming them into totems of life, like sugar-coated candies, through the application of gold leaf or lace. In the same way, on old envelopes from the turn of the 20th century; finely-traced drawings dialogue in echo with the obsolete addresses and stamps.

Femininity often runs parallel to steely monsters: estheticism of one aspect of the world to have a different gaze upon the disturbing. The plants and animals are there as a reminder that the living can still win. A fascination for the morbid is rendered sublime by the finesse of the accomplishment, hinting at vanities and a certain Neo-romanticism. A somber and yet luminous ambiance.

In addition to her solo work, Besson is a member of an artistic duo, Major Minuit, which uses a playful and graphic universe to pose poetic questions about the world we live in.

Please contact the gallery for more information.