Carbon
Carbon is common to all known forms of life. It is the fourth most abundant element in the universe and the second most abundant in the human body. The landscapes that Valentin Bajolle creates using charcoal (a tool largely made up of carbon) tell the story of this living matter, in motion, in front of which the viewer is a passing witness.
Whatever the scale chosen to measure, nothing that belongs to the physical world is fixed in time or space. Like charcoal, itself the product of a series of transformations, the works capture the fragment of an ongoing metamorphosis. This metamorphosis takes place over an indefinite interval. Are we witnessing the genesis of something? Is there really a beginning and an end? At what point in the cycle are we?
These forms evolve in a space that extends beyond the paper. They show themselves, protrusions whose origin remains invisible to our eyes, epiphenomena of a parallel nature that it is up to us to explore.
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Imprints
Valentin Bajolle’s painting exists in its own right, and reveals itself without detours. It reveals an autonomous space, governed by its own coherence, in which each individual is free to evolve. Each painting bears witness to a spontaneous exploration of matter. This research relies on the physical properties of paint – viscosity, transparency, intensity – by diverting the tools ordinarily associated with it. In a constantly evolving process, color accumulates on the surface, then recedes in a series of successive cycles. Gradually, light and movement are revealed on the canvas. The finished work is the result of a process juggling chance and control, a point of balance.
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“ Valentin Bajolle opens up an inner space through modulation, where the material of the air comes alive in a blackness rediscovered between torment and impetus, violence and tenderness, punch and caress. Her paintings are nervous, with intertwining textures. It’s a slow vertigo that catches up, a dance between the attraction of the earth and the light that emerges from it, between weight and lightness. In short, life. ”
Jeanne Gatard, 2022
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Fluids
Combining painting and drawing, this series presents imaginary landscapes governed by phenomena linked to nature: erosion, eruption, fusion, growth. Matter becomes in turn solid, liquid or vaporous. It seems to be the product of a chemical or physical reaction within a space, giving rise to an object.
In a process initially akin to automatic writing, during which matter accumulates on the canvas, Valentin Bajolle seek to reveal zones of confrontation and friction. These zones are expressed by a framing that determines a silhouette, thus completing the formation of a figure. The painting then resides on the border between two states, the frontality of abstraction and the illusion of the represented object.
The surfaces shown are the emerging point of a volume deployed in all its depth. They are constructed by the black-white binomial, a chiaroscuro stretching from the hidden to the revealed. What eludes us in the shadows is the painting’s inaccessibility, the indiscernible part that establishes form in a space of which we never grasp more than a fragment.
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