« In my work, I reflect on the duplication of the image and its constant archiving in a present where visual consumption is increasingly frantic and paradoxically always more superficial and anecdotal. The constant multiplication of image sharing platforms and virtual social connections supposedly meant to unite us tends to create a universal collective memory. But the more the image is consumed, the more it seems to lose its essence and become a simple stimulus escaping our sensibility.
I paint exhibition spaces according to the standards of photography of the genre, where the artworks presented become generic in favor of a photography strategy of what should be "an exhibition", but also of art books or computers. Thus, I create a double mise en abîme: that of the subject within the subject, but especially that of an image which carries within it the hybridization of hundreds of others.
My painting thus tends to become an element that generates by itself a unique and new feeling from the falls and distortions of other images, other mediums, other realities.»
— GV
For his second exhibition at Parliament Gallery, Guillaume Valenti presents a single large scale oil on canvas that functions as a stage for eight small paintings on wood. Valenti found this image, an open-air exhibition space in the middle of a forest, online. As if to make room for his works, the artist has emptied its white walls. Lush green foliage, a certain force of nature, contains a central void. Although Valenti's work has always been tied to the architecture of exhibition spaces, his new works (all 2023) also approach landscape painting.
Although Valenti refers to his three desktop scenes as natures mortes, the small scale paintings become a sort of nightscape. On glowing computer screens, the internet’s horizons ominously expand. It is an ambiguous space, framed by open windows and populated by reproductions of figurative paintings. Uncertainty reigns, as in Valenti’s paintings of his cat. A peculiar light washes over the lanky striped animal, flattened by the artist’s almost monochromatic palette.
In the artists’s painting of a Mondrian catalogue opened on a shag carpet, it’s the empty left page he defines as the focal point. Its bright white is surrounded by a fluffy pink carpet and the reproduction of the De Stijl master's work. The same luminosity, coupled with a distancing of the subject, radiates from Valenti's work painted from a reproduction of Fra Angelico's Annunciation. The iconic image, the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel sheltered inside a loggia, is separated in two by the book’s binding. With his intensely worked surfaces, Valenti shows us not only painting, but its systems of reproduction and reframing.
— Lillian Davies
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