fragments and figures
Mysteries of matter
The curtain opens on a manual operation of the most secret kind, specific to those who attempt by subterfuges both material and immaterial to accelerate time, even to master its action over things and beings.
Damien Valero played with alchemical codes, with the idea, when working for the National Typographical Workshop, of finding the configuration of a new writing inscribed on metal. Engraving, as we know, was the most suitable medium to stabilise the stages of the alchemical process, the curious emblems of the Opus Magnum, the Great Work, the fantasy of transforming metals. "In short, the alchemist treats Matter as divinity was treated in the Mysteries: the mineral substances "suffer", "die" and are "reborn" to another mode of existence, that is to say they are transmuted." Mircea Eliade - The Forge and the Crucible (1977)
Here the artist is in his forge with his gloves and his surgeon's tools, his elements and his chemist's recipes: he covers the steel plate with an engraving varnish (Syrian asphalt) and etches backwards geometric signs, the characters of esoteric typographies. Into these very fine grooves, he pours the nitric acid that eats into the steel. Then, he removes the varnish with the help of a dissolvent and the steel plate is now operational for the future engravings, multiplied images of signs facing the right way around.
These practices are what give rise to his reflection on the relationship between the unique, singular object (the engraved plate) and the multiplication of identical reproductions (the engravings). Today he is pursuing this reflection in relation to the technique of the digital image which can be developed on all sorts of mediums (paper, steel, cloth...). The digital image is, in his opinion, in the process of becoming "the new serigraphy of our time".
His first works have been placed under the sign of wax. The reading of the book by Henri Cros: L'encaustique et les autres procédés de peinture chez les Anciens : histoire et technique (1884) [Encaustics and other painting techniques among the Ancients: history and technique] incited him to work on this malleable materiel of many virtues.
Originally, wax, which one finds in the first portraits from nature on the sarcophagi of Fayyoum, seals the pigments by fire, mummifies the painting and imprisons the bright colours which are thus preserved from the ravages of time.
With the imago, originally meaning a "funerary mask", wax restores the living person or a trace of the living person through the face, considered as the truth and the identity of being. This idea which is again present with the identity photo will soon be replaced by a more precise biometry, the iris of the eye, the hand print, the DNA code. Before these new techniques of bio-power, a body without a face, disfigured or decapitated, could not be identified.
Wax had the function of keeping the face of the dead person alive without damaging it. Similarly, Damien Valero preserves the face or details of the body imprisoned in wax and resin. The elements are set, as if arrested in time, taken by surprise in a catastrophe, like bodies in Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius, bodies captured by ice avalanches, or, closer to us today, bodies destroyed in terrorist attacks, their faces swollen, with severed hands and projected members scattered over the pavement.
Through this succession of chosen images, as in a fade in and out, the artist exposes the landscape of his recent works where he invests several fields: engraving, painting, photography, sculpture, installation. He questions the body in the fundamental sense of the term: he tortures it. Moreover, this is the word used in alchemical treatises to refer to the working of metals. He grinds it down and tries to understand through his experiments what it is that man is made of.
This catalogue could also be seen as assemblage of traces, evidence, objects that a forensic expert might have found on crimes scenes. Perhaps it about killing figuration and representation, after a few well identified acts of violence on certain parts of the body? Clues on time would seem to tell us things about birth (variations on a navel, a vegetal triangle...), on birth (the skeletons of nuclear radios, frozen, anonymous portraits...), eroticism (the sensual mouths, buttocks, breasts...), suffering (accumulation of severed hands, faces burnt by wax, the martyrdom of Saint Agathe...). Make sure you preserve these images and these objects like the details of an investigation for a fragmented autopsy of the human being.
The techniques of the plastic artist solicit our relationship with the body, to its surface, its depth, its visible form, to the formlessness of its entrails... Wax and latex as substitutes for the skin provide possibilities of plasticity to signify the fragilities of the body in combining erotic effects (attractions) and theatres of cruelty (repulsions).
Text by Lionel Dax
Translation by Garry White