DEAR VAL
Valentine Smets (b.1991)
Visual Artist
Lives and works in Brussels and Helsinki
Dear Val,
whether a text can best illustrate your work?
Could it add something to it, would a text enrich it?
Letters, cast into words could somehow shyly sneak up on your art, cling to your practice from the side, but can they ever do it justice?
Would they scare your art? Hardly likely …
Imagine there are no fixed letters, no words, no elegies that stand next to your work. It wouldn't even be fragmentary poems, but more tangible alternatives …
Maybe you would need more something like
an apple still life frosty in the snow waiting for the first sun in the morning,
a long fabric of brocade clinging to a pillar,
a school gym full of movement,
milky glass,
the smell of freshly mown grass and damp leaves in the forest,
the constructed explosion of a building,
a hazy sunset, ...
All of this could possibly approach your gestures, your practice, your very lively paintings and your body. All of this could create a loose chain of associations, an equivalence of feelings, facts, forms and dreams. These compilations would not be illustrations of your work, but rather environments that, just like your art, would be difficult to describe, but could only be experienced. Like your art, they would turn into an eclectic superposition, sucking you in, slowly chopping you up, feeling you with their tongue, tasting carefully, swallowing and scrunching, but at least digested you, releasing you back into the real world.
Your practice plays with paradise and this is manifold, it is at the same time an inner projection, an illusion, and also an open fact.
All this is one thing. The other is you, Val Smets, a young painter who can be so clearly located in time and space, who is standing, lying and kneeling on her large-format paintings waiting on the floor, who is so caught up in the light of her surroundings, who freezes body emotions, who climbs so far out of the painting’s space that the real space becomes a painting itself, who at the same time takes her paintings as important and unimportant as all other tools of her art, who thinks so precisely of us viewers, who works on transcendence with such a human measurement, …
The interfaces between these inner migrations and outer projections that you open up are what make us so confident, so overwhelmed, so fragile and just so human.
shyly, best,
Markus