Press release written by Thomas Evans 

Margaux Valengin’s latest paintings consider corporeality as both artifice and animality, staging richly ambiguous fables of bodily aggression, protection, and vulnerability, often between paired beings. The bodies populating these works invoke darker, inward, more explicitly psychic moods than in previous recent paintings, and frequently confront the viewer in direct address with a kind of iconic authority. Whether human, horse, dog, or cat, these taut, articulated, fragmentary figures silently project defiance, protection, sinuous arousal, nocturnal menace or melancholy. 

A recurrent pairing in Valengin’s new works is that of guardian animal with clothed female body, as in Grimes (2025), Un, deux, trois, quatre, l’orgueil, l’audace, l’usure (2025) and Caramel Oil (2025). The female bodies here are depicted either as a fragment or abbreviated by the image frame. They are also simultaneously sexual and sexualized, and powerfully so. In tandem with their fragmentary forms, the fetishistic character of their clothing intensifies their object-like qualities, casting these enigmatic figures as the titular “part objects.” This term, coined by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in the 1920s (concurrent, notably, with the inception of Surrealism), describes the infant’s phantasy life, in which anxiety is managed by splitting the body of its caregiver into separate, good or bad “part” objects. These part objects, if they remain such, then become the object of fetishization (that is, erotic attachment). In Valengin’s scenarios—rendered with her typical virtuoso brushwork (itself evoking fetishistic qualities in its sleek perfection)—fetish takes several forms. Sometimes it is a dominatrix costume, as in Un, deux, trois, quatre, l’orgueil, l’audace, l’usure (2025); at others, it may be a suit that clings closely but gently like honey or cellophane to the figure and exposes flesh, or a costume of insectlike segments, as in Grimes (2025) and Chevalière bleue (2026), that connotes armour. In most cases, these close-fitting second skins mirror the tautness of animal flesh, while also signalling constraint and style. A departure from this pattern is Optimal velu poilu (2025), where the female body seems to disappear within a closely cropped section of gathered-in fabric, the hound’s long snout dramatized by its lowered brow positioned protectively in front of the figure. 

However, if the cats, dogs, and horses often seem to function as sentinels, occasionally it is the human figure who guards them, as with Caramel Oil (2025) or Chevalière bleue (2026). Nonetheless, although these animals are usually domestic creatures, they barely seem so here: the cats verge on cougars, the dogs often seem more like wolves, the horses are not, say, gentle colts, but rather untamed horses at full gallop. Although sometimes these animals are shown only partially, it is perhaps significant that they tend not to connote part-objects (one exception might be Un, deux, trois, quatre, l’orgueil, l’audace, l’usure [2025], where the horse’s body is dispersed into parts across the picture plane). 

Throughout these new paintings, the conjunction of compositional elements is so stark and explicit (made more so by frequent disparity in lighting between parts) that it immediately invites the viewer to consider what kind of correlation between them is being staged. The relation is not erotic; eros permeates these paintings, but it lies less in any friction between elements than in the articulation and muscularity of individual elements. Although Valengin’s paintings suggest the legacy of Surrealism, her juxtapositions are not Surrealist in the sense of, say, Lautréamont’s “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”—that is, they do not exist to foster surprising or startling connections. Rather they suggest psychic tensions around power and dispossession that only the act of image-making can articulate—while still retaining their intensities.