Présentation de Olivier VALENTIN

What makes an artist chooses a medium over another? Circumstances, meetings, his journey of life... It is perhaps this last point may explain why Olivier Valentin has always chosen as the bonding mode of expression. He likes to tell stories, history, constructing a plot, a script, take the viewer through the maze of his world, feed the wire of the news and write it differently. The art of collage lends itself perfectly to this point.

In the collages of Olivier Valentin, is still a character camped in a different world from him, as if he were lost in a city or out of step with its environment. The fragments of dream are intertwined with snippets of reality; humor and poetry have citizenship and are a guide through the jungle of emotions, images and events that beset us.

Olivier Valentin has always handled the materials, recovered, hijacked. In a previous life, he used accumulations of wood residues palette to create, but the demon of the bonding has taken since childhood : he already customisait radios from his mother. Living in a city, it is also an early interest in urban art. During this period he painted murals on the ground, on walls. In the open air. His artistic expression is second nature, it does not consider himself an artist, he does not show his work, he lives almost secretly in his world "underground" has accumulated monumental pieces he spends an infinite time to realize and develop his writing. For in his collages, Olivier Valentin does not use newspapers or the usual materials of collage (including posters). He prefers papers and stamps. It selects all sorts of papers. : Old, thin, thick, transparent, wallpaper, old, and he participated in their quest, china, he hunts in flea markets, on the internet. The result is a strange alchemy followed by osmosis with a felt bound to an image that triggers a process. From this starting point is articulated a skein of reminiscences and allusions. The family of the artist as the news weave the fabric of this puzzle which he assembles the pieces with patience. He reconstructs, draws, writes, paints and draws on its web mapping fragmented which takes us through writings, hieroglyphics, calligraphy and graffiti. The fluidity of the finished works are achieved at the cost of a long process of maturation. The message, subtle, leads smoothly. He must decipher the works of Olivier Valentin. As a comic, every detail counts. The artist does not juxtapose it depicts. With refinement, calling alternately Pollock, Warhol, COBRA, urban art, unique art, Oulipo, narrative figuration, post pop. But if art has expanded its family, he refuses to be locked up anywhere. It keeps intact especially its ability to marvel at the power of writing when he scrawled his first words on his school desk. This magic and innocence, nostalgia, poetic power up the universe resulted from this artist who subtly revisits its history and the history all the stories that haunt us and which we dare not necessarily by talking.

Brigitte Camus
Author of "Buffet or psychoanalysis signature" - Publishing Epure