Artistieke projecten

Valérian Goalec (°1986, lives and works in Brussels) observes the shape of utilitarian objects from everyday life and public space. These mass-produced artifacts seem to be designed to be inconspicuous. When divorced from their original context however, they take on a poetically absurd sculptural appearance, acquiring a different status through their spatial disposition or through the transitional operations effected on their materials or their scale.

These transitions result from intuitive thinking, associations of ideas, uses, forms and materials. Through a play on personal meanings and rebus, the initial configuration sometimes leads to completely abstract solutions, removed from their primary use. Adjusting events to structures with a sense of practical inventiveness akin to what Claude Lévi-Strauss defined as the “savage thought,” he highlights a diachronic relation to objects and beings.

The project designed for Art Brussels hence takes into account the often clinical, labyrinthine, standardized dimension of art fairs. It proposes an exploration of proxemics as a processe of being-with-others, through touch, sight, smell or sound. The visitors activate the existing fluxes into an imperceptible loop: traces of newspaper ink on the hands, blending with those placed on the copper bar and with the hydroalcoholic gel distributed in vials to be activated. The installation is to be understood in relation to the paradoxes between the natural and the artificial, the industrial and the artisanal, the living and the sanitized, the organic and the mechanic.

Curated by Maud Salembier