Valentine Dardel

Valentine Dardel (born in 1998) is a French visual artist whose sensitive practice is multidisciplinary, mixing painting, drawing, textile and installation. Trained at the Central Saint Martins (bachelor’s degree in textile design, congratulations from the jury, 2021) then at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin (DNA, 2023), she enriches her career with international experiences, notably at the Weißensee Art Academy in Berlin (2018) and during an internship at Hong Kon g (2020).

Her approach is built around light, the founding element of her images. Fearing the dark, she develops a research that makes light a refuge and an aesthetic engine. Drape, fold and material, inherited from his career in textile design, guide his approach to the image. She works with sensitive materials such as velvet, which interact with light and create a tension between the visible and the invisible. The images ar  e born from fragments — bodies, gestures, folds—derived from videos then digitally deconstructed, allowing a distance from the source and a shift towards a diffuse figuration. The body becomes texture, surface, vibration. Light and saturation disturb perception: contours dissolve, the image transforms to the rhythm of the wandering.

In her exhibition project, the artist deepens this exploration of the fold and the body through fragmented female figures. The works are composed like puzzles of flesh and color, born from the movement of a body captured on video. The folds sculpt the light, revealing unexpected curves. A play of irification disturbs the vision, forcing the spectator to constantly recompose the figure. Nothing is given, nothing is immediate: the eye must take time. Between textile craftsmanship, photography, digital retouches and material prints, his images are in an intermediate state, in perpetual metamorphosis. The velvet, the central material of the series, intensifies this visual disturbance: its reflections impose a constant movement and arouse the desire for touch, while emphasizing its inaccessibility.