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My work develops through different series with which I question the boundaries of image and drawing.
When I work on a new piece, I always go through a certain amount of research. I start with the research on framing or format on my computer and then I proceed with research on paper, which allows me to understand the materials that will be used to intervene with the drawing and its alteration. This practical exploration of materials on paper allows me to find a balance between being spontaneous and creating something more though through.
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VALENTIN VAN DER MEULEN deconstructs to better imagine it, and open it to imaginary.
The face, the trace : just a letter to erase to reveal, by what is left, what is not. The image imposes its meaning : the trace reveals its essence. Valentin van der Meulen, with the erasure, reintroduces interpretation into the image. He deconstructs to better imagine it, and open it to imaginary.
How to build images?
Do not take the image as absolute, not statufier it, not to make it an idol.
The artist, as iconoclast, is an eraser. Erasing opens the image to the narration. Erased image becomes time and story, narrative of the erasure. It becomes beauty and emotion, by its fragility, and what it tells us of the hand that erases it, and of the human being that fades away. It becomes the passing time.In the contemplation of the erasure, something happened, which occurs in front our eyes, when the drawing becomes gesture, and the image becomes different.
It dematerializes itself.
Eliette Abecassis
French writer, French philosopher and Critic -
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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?
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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 ?
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Available researches
Not Like This... ? series -
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Available big scale drawings
Not Like This... ? Serie -
When I intervene with one of my drawings by erasing or by another type of overlay, it is an indelible gesture that cannot be undone.
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«It is in his ability to combine the graphic project with the chosen image that Valentin van der Meulen reveals his mastery of drawing : the same force that emerges from the drawing is in the gesture and the look. Often the drawings of sculptors testify how they will use stone, wood, we think here about Baselitz or Dodeigne. The same weight of the hand is printed in the material. Valentin van der Meulen is not a sculptor, but his drawing manages to give a real presence in space to the image.»
Paul Hervé Parsy
Curator ex Director of Château d’Oiron and of the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou
Vegetation Sketches, 3 December 2020 - 3 January 2021
