Résidence Saint-Ange - Duo show -
Text by Isabelle Bernini
Residency 01/02/2023 > 30/04/2023
Seyssin (France)
Duo show 14/12/2023 > 23/12/2023
Ancien Musée de la Peinture - Grenoble (France)
ENG. In a world where visual culture is increasingly powerful, the image has become a means for capturing the
soul of an era, its handwriting, its ultimate democratic form of expression, capable of bearing witness to
both the noblest and the most futile causes. Our civilization is constantly reviving its cult-like dedication to
the image, and, with the production of images growing at a dizzying rate, their distribution has become an
equally important symbolic issue. The image as document is at the heart of Valentin van der Meulen’s graphic
work. To analyze what images tell us about the relationship between photography and truth, Valentin van der
Meulen reproduces various images; whether captured by his camera, found, or taken from newspapers and
the internet, in large-format drawings.
Drawing adds another layer to the image’s troubled, evocative, suggested reality—itself an imprint of an
ever more distant reality. Done on paper and then pasted onto wood, the drawing finds thickness; it takes
on body. Valentin van der Meulen reexamines the role of the photographic image within the flows of media
in contemporary culture, questioning its ambivalence as a historical document. Though the image covers
reality—in the journalistic sense of the term—it also covers the latter up, by the view of the person who
recorded or captured it (by the subtext that occasionally accompanies it, by the medium through which it is
distributed, which channels it…).
This approach creates a certain distance with the image, transforming it into a drawn, physical object. Yet, the
artist goes even further in his exploration. Shifting his gaze towards the interior, he establishes frames, isolating
fragments that become snippets of a scattered narrative. Through his cutting gesture, which is simultaneously
radical and almost hazardous, he recreates outlines, establishing boundaries between the representation and
absence of the image. Leaving only a few visual clues to determine the source, he allows meaning to drift.
Fragmented by the framing, the individual, the original photographic subject, becomes even more anonymous
or indeterminate. Parts of the body are transformed into uncertain landscapes, and fragments of words or
expressions can barely be grasped.
Though he borrows the principle of cut-ups, collage, copying, division, and covering up, it is almost by working
as an editor that Valentin van der Meulen redeploys his work in space. Using a principle close to translation,
the fragmented visual is shifted to a different surface, reflected in a different field.
The images, in this way truncated and multiplied, are stripped of their narrative potential; they become
eternally suspended moments. The further we move away from the subject, the closer we get not only to
the limits of the visible but also of the speakable. These images are closer to evocation, to reminiscence, to a
barely recalled memory.
And yet, there is no loss of meaning because piercing the image allows, literally and figuratively, to delve below
its surface. Each image is the result of painstaking research done by the artist on our distorted relationship
with the historical image: portraits of heroes who remain anonymous or on the margins of official history,
photographs taken during specific events but used for ends other than documentary, images voided of their
politically subversive content, or even vernacular images that are at the same time sufficiently familiar and
indeterminate to give rise to the beginnings of a fictional projection.
Though it is difficult to situate history at first glance, with the work offering us images that are unflaggingly
fortuitous, it is this feeling of the impermanence of things, of the rewriting of history, and the manipulation of
information in a communicating world that drives Valentin van der Meulen. This visual rhetoric of fragmentation
speaks of power relationships and control of the masses and of individuals. But through its process of
self-destruction—as if to reproduce the movement of thought that leads us to consume and digest information
according to a predetermined cycle—his “altered” images reveal the discomfort that reigns over our perception
of the image, a discomfort that is sometimes already present in the original capture or recording.
A 21st-century artist, Valentin van der Meulen, has assimilated the legacy of the Pictures Generation of the
1970s and 1980s—to use the term developed by Douglas Crimp. This movement brought together artists
who, inspired by the images of mass media attempting to shape society, developed a critique of it through
the use of the same weapons and visual mechanisms, diverting norms and stereotypes. Their approach, based
on the copy, no longer sought to produce work that was original, or that had never been seen before, which
had been the goal of art up until that point. It was also a way of circumventing the search for expressiveness
expected of artists. Copying images made to fascinate or arouse desire was the best way to criticize the
psychological manipulation at work within them.
Through his approach, Valentin van der Meulen reinjects the possibility of accident into the work—the random
gesture, dissonance. Through lack, through an intentional loss of meaning, he grants himself the power to
establish a frontier between the visible and the invisible, the imaginary and the real, truth and trickery. It is a
matter of moving away from common discourse to enter the polysemic narrative of the feeling of things rather
than pure and simple storytelling. The time of creation is not that of current affairs. And though artists do not
produce historical documents, they do create equally important documents of memory which ultimately fall
more on the side of truth.
Isabelle Bernini
November 2023
Independent curator
© Copyright Valentin van der Meulen