CAC Brétigny

“Under the stairs”

Valentine Gardiennet is leading a residency with three classes from the Joséphine Baker primary school in Fleury-Mérogis. Her project Sous l’escalier  proposes an exploration of drawing and painting on a large scale, combined with the invention of fictional stories. Taking questions like "What does it mean to inhabit a place, a house, an apartment?" as their starting point, the pupils are invited to collectively imagine worlds and characters that are at once funny, poetic and offbeat. In each workshop, the pupils will write fictional diary entries, drawing inspiration from children’s books and contemporary art and working together towards a publication.

Valentine Gardiennet is a visual artist who explores a wide variety of materials. Her projects often begin with drawings and sketches that metamorphose into vast papier-mâché structures in monumental forms and bright colours.  Reminiscent of giant carnival figures, her installations oscillate between folk festivities and fantasy universe. Fuelled by popular culture, fiction and childhood and teenage imaginations, she revives a playful and exuberant visual vocabulary. Her creations take the form of visual narratives to be inhabited rather than contemplated. These colourful volumes bring to mind worlds created by children's book illustrators and authors like Claude Ponti and Kazuo Iwamura where we are immersed in collective stories populated by hybrid creatures as funny as they are disturbing. Like a life-sized children's picture book, her installations invite us to cross the threshold of an imaginary space where fiction and reality interlace. 

^{Graduating from the art school Villa Arson in Nice in 2020, her work has been exhibited at the Sissi Club (Marseille), La Tôlerie (Clermont-Ferrand), Bellevue (Douarnenez), Vilnius Art Fair, the art centre Les Églises (Chelles), Capucins (Embrun) and Magasins Généraux (Pantin).}

^{This residency is part of an ACTE project supported by the Académie de Versailles.}