Margaux Valengin: Hues d’Emportement

Hues d’Emportement examines how individual and collective imaginations contest the entangled architectures of gender, representation and time. These seven oil paintings mark a departure from Valengin’s previous work, which informed by feminist Marxist thinkers and surrealists, explored women’s bodies as sites of resistance in the face of capitalist patriarchy.  Yet, we can follow the surrealist thread to assemblages of estranged digital stock images, archival prints and abstract brushstrokes that evoke dreamscapes of the collective unconscious.

Through a collage-based process, rooted in physical and digital archival research, Valengin is attentive to the simultaneity of the representational regimes that produce her visual economies. If a newspaper reading public engendered the body politic of the 20th century nation state, alienated individuals and black mirrors (or digital screens) are emblematic of the disassociated, malady ridden populations of late capitalism in the 21st. Seemingly discordant organisms, objects and landscapes belonging to multiple temporalities, inhabit her canvas, forming a sensuous and grotesque language of form.

In “Mephistopheles”, a gigantic sphinx-like cat emerges from the photorealistic interior of a minivan, disrupting the triumphalism of the suburban America that looms in the background. “Birdbraidedbrain” depicts three slick cars suspended on a plane before a thick and foreboding background of textured brushwork. Here, it is the figurative car that appears to be out of place, lost in an unsettling forest of abstract strokes. The reoccurring wallpaper motifs of vines and tendrils in several other works - an allusion to the Art Noveau movement and its romanticized representations of nature - gesture to both the linearity of art history and the rigidity of domestic space.

Emportement, the French for anger or rage, encapsulates the discontent of our times. For the artist however, the hues of her anger are tempered into what Remedios Varo calls an “expressive resting place… a way of communicating the incommunicable".

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