Artists

Guillaume Valenti

Press release

'Système domestique', Guillaume Valenti's new exhibition, presents a series of paintings produced within the enclosed space of the artist's home. Alternating between views from the studio window and depictions of his bookshelf at different moments of the day, the works extend a methodology central to his practice: an intimate point of departure that is reframed within a broader inquiry into the status of the image and its conditions of circulation in contemporary visual culture. At the core of this domestic system lies the orthogonal grid, commonly referred to in painting as "mise au carreau", which has long engaged the artist as a device for translating the image and its proportions from the real to the graphic. Here, the grid assumes a material presence, its lines embodied by those of the bookshelf itself. In a gesture recalling seventeenth-century Flemish cabinets of curiosities, or André Breton's wall now preserved at the Centre Pompidou, the library emerges as a form of self-portrait. Works gifted by fellow artists, books on the painters who have shaped his vision of art, together with everyday objects imbued with personal memory, coalesce into the salient features of his identity- his own pantheon. These works, however, extend beyond the register of the personal to engage a broader reflection on systems of representation. The bookshelf functions not only as a site of storage, but as a dispositif of display- presented to those who cross the threshold of the domestic interior. It becomes a stage upon which subjectivity is composed, negotiated, and projected, and where personal mythologies take form through processes of selection, arrangement, and visibility. The logic of mise au carreau thus expands into a wider conceptual framework. The structuring of intimate material into discrete units mirrors a contemporary condition in which private experience is increasingly formatted for public exposure. Personal references coalesce into composite images of the self, producing a gradual shift from interiority to display- a form of pixelation in which complex subjectivity is rendered into legible fragments, revealed case by case, shelf by shelf. Two paintings of the exterior of the artist's studio punctuate this system, introducing moments of visual and conceptual interval, like brief apertures between the variables of an identity in the process of being articulated. Biography Guillaume Valenti was born in Evry in 1987 and lives and works in Paris. He is a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris. His work has been exhibited at the Fondation Lambert, Palais de l'Institut de France, Salon de Montrouge, CAC Meymac, Galerie Baronian, Brownstone Foundation, Poush Manifesto, Echo Park (Los Angeles) and Griffin Gallery (London), among others. He has completed residencies at Poush Manifesto (FR), Cité des Arts (FR), Casa Velasquez (ES), Chamalot, Résidence d'artistes (FR). He was the recipient of the Prix Martin, Jeune Création, winner of the Diamond Prize / Société Générale, and finalist for the Weil Prize. His works are represented in various public and private collections, including the collection of the MAMC (Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d'Olonne) and the collection of Société Générale. Looking at art is an exercise that forms the basis of Guillaume Valenti's work, its formal and conceptual foundation. He condenses into images the spirit of the amateur with whom a part of him identifies. His work is inseparable from the art history with which it was built. The painter places his own referential field at the center of his works, and thus retranscribes a whole cycle of consumption and assimilation of art images in which he himself is involved. He understands painting as a language, with its interplay of intertextuality, quotations, responses, ce-qui-est-à-l'un-est-à-l'autre; with a grammar of innuendo and déjà-vus to which everyone contributes, as history unfolds. Guillaume Valenti is interested in the image on the wall, or more precisely, the image of the image on the wall. In the same way as in the theater, paintings constitute a synthesis and mediation of reality in a closed space-time, a scenic composition that isolates an instant from the common world, only to return to it with a different eye. Through this process, the viewer in turn doubles up to see himself or herself in the act of seeing, in a social theater of the gaze.