Exhibition
Antony Valerian – erste Reihe Hunderennen
Exhibition
14 to 21 January 2023
Opening hours:
Mon to Fri 10am to 6pm
Sat 11am to 4pm
Opening on 13 January 2023 at 6pm
Fasanenstrasse 25, 10719 Berlin
The odd gal out in the ancestral portrait gallery
Antony Valerian’s women of the 21st century
Of course, we know nothing about this woman in yellow. But we do note the regal look of her attire, the self-confident serenity radiating from her bearing, the life experience etched into her face. The cigarette between her fingers, from which a plume of white smoke rises like some sort of signal, betokens a female self-reliance that rises above staid convention.
Whatever the black-coifed woman is doing there on the round tabletop with her hands, she is evidently adept at it. It is probably some special skill of hers. She has handled the materials so often in her life that she hardly needs to look. And she most definitely has no need for validation from anyone!
Or take the woman in the green pleated skirt. It could well be that she had someone at her side once, but now she stands alone. The lattice pattern around marks out what is her rightful place now: front and center.
The painter Antony Valerian discovered these women in the photographs of August Sander. They originate in the artist’s Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (“People of the 20th Century”), a voluminous archive of camera portraits of people from all walks of life. These female subjects were country folk, the wives of farmers.
There is nothing that people would rather look at than other people. Newborns, who can barely do anything else, have that one capability: reading faces. After, all, decrypting the meaning of facial expressions is a skill essential to their survival from the moment they open their eyes. As humans, we have no choice but to look, right from the start. It is an impulse we all share with others throughout our lives – this need to decipher what we see in the person in front of us. Even when the face we are trying to read is a painted one. Or perhaps that arouses our scrutiny even more.
When Antony Valerian paints people, it is as if they are behind a translucent curtain. All the usual elements of portraiture are there: the pose, the visage, the wardrobe. Yet none of them are fully spelled out. Much like in a dream, where zooming in is not allowed because it would pull the background to the front and block our view. So our only option is to keep our distance and continue relying on what we already know. What is certain is the long and familiar tradition of portraying sovereigns and rulers. Could it be that we are dealing with portraits from an ancestral gallery here?
The answer is yes, the ancestral gallery being that of portraiture itself. Since Antiquity, this has been the preferred genre for showcasing the power generally wielded by men. Museums, palaces, and art collections are full of these men. If the top rung of society is reserved to the mature absolute ruler – independent, beholden to no one, tyrannical or clement according to his fancy – then the lowest rung is occupied by the ageing, solitary woman. Even though she, too, ironically enough, may be self-reliant, answerable to no one, and peremptory or gentle as the mood strikes her: The same qualities which have served to elevate the man throughout history merely underscore the woman’s lack of importance.
With his portraits, Antony Valerian seems to reverse this cruel injustice. He paints these women in a way no one else ever would, endowing them with the prerogative to remain completely opaque. Thus, they stake out their space without giving us anything of that which the writings of history have taught us to expect: There is no grace in evidence here, no assiduous zeal or learned scholarship. No, the women in Antony Valerian’s pictures have the roles which they themselves have chosen. They cleave to them, having no intention of ingratiating themselves or changing the slightest thing, much less stepping out of the way. They are rulers in their own right.
Old faces are much more interesting for him to paint, says Antony Valerian. There’s more that is happening, there’s more that is simply there. We know nothing about this woman in yellow. But she knows about us.
Silke Hohmann, Berlin 2022
Antony Valerian (b. 1992 in Hamburg, Germany; lives and works between Berlin, Lisbon and Marrakech) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna at Daniel Richter’s Expanded Pictorial Space. He recently received the Pollock-Krasner-Foundation-NYC Grant.
Valerian´s last solo exhibition in Berlin was held at Galerie Crone in 2019.
Valerian´s painting in which he moves is like a sequential glitch in the matrix of our visual pictorial knowledge. Everything is processed into each other or has been separated in the layering of color, duct or composition viewed closely. Which arises and falls apart at same when stepping back.
The satisfaction of appetite happens to be impossible
The satisfaction of appetite is frustrating
So its always better to be a little bit hungry
In his paintings he tries to not feed till sated. He wants to leave space to be filled. The space that is left for the satisfaction of appetite. Telling is always also inventing
"Valerian takes a problem-solving approach to painting which translates into disproportional perspectives, innovative surface textures and surprising use of colour." Colección Solo Madrid
Since 2015, has exhibited in Madrid, Hamburg, New York, Moscow, Vienna and Berlin, among others
Highlights
© Antony Valerian
Exhibition view
