Valentin Van der Meulen: Vegetation Sketches

As Eliette Abecassis says in her text, Valentin van der Meulen’s work in charcoal includes drawing as a process from its fabrication to its deconstruction in order to question the object that image is. To alter it to question its story and its legacy, placing the viewer in the center of his subjects. It’s in his exhibition «Remember» at the gallery Hengevoss-Dürkop of Hamburg (Germany), that for the first time he created the dialogue in between drawing and painting. Between or recovery, the question then became plastic.It is in this sense that the series of drawings «Not like this ...?» was created. Beyond the questions about Is it still figuration? or did it become abstraction? It’s thinking about this association by questioning the hybridity of mediums we can find for exemple in the definitions of painting in United States during 1960 : is it still drawing? Or did it become painting? 

 Fragments of images translated into charcoal sometimes considered as a motif dialogue with thick black paint widely spread. But reading this series of drawings without thinking about how we read images that are presented to viewers would be reductive. Suggesting here for example what a portrait tells us or what the representation of nature shows us by that. In our time that creating a pornographic relationship with images through our technological research of always more definition pixel, choosing only to make visible fragments is it not a more erotic way to read and conceive of what the picture shows us ?