Peeling the layers of the unconscious to reveal a palimpsest of the absurd, the disturbing, and the libidinal, Part-Object Phantasies, a new and ongoing series of paintings, marks a return to the surrealist vernacular of Margaux Valengin’s early career (most notably her 2020 Sang Tu Erres). A menagerie of animals, tactile surfaces, and viscerally segmented female bodies populate slick, violent, and foreboding canvases. Referencing the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s notion of the “unconscious phantasy” - the psychic process by which the infant first relates to others not as whole beings, but as fragments, such as the breast or the hand – the series questions the revolutionary promise of surrealism by interrogating the female body as at once fragmented and as exceeding fragmentation. 

In the diptych Cinéma, a damsel in distress appears to be staked to the ground against a desert landscape inhabited by wild horses. Yet, it is only her translucently cloaked torso that is visible to the viewer. The aesthetics of glamour is apparent in the coquettish starlet in the foreground of L’étau de tes mains. She emerges decapitated from a dark canvas slashed viscerally by an exaggerated brushstroke revealing skin-like layers. These interrupted bodies, evoke the canonical male surrealists of the 20th century who - influenced by the emerging concept of the unconscious - depicted the dismembered female form, to them an object of both desire and disgust. In Signe d’une araignée, a photorealistic close-up of a feminine eye seems to call into question not only the history of perception but the gendered nature of looking. In reappropriating these tropes, Valengin draws a lineage to the female surrealists who reclaimed women’s bodies as sites of resistance against patriarchal modernity. Part-Object Phantasies, however, refuses to offer a liberal feminist narrative of empowerment. These paintings instead invite reflection upon the fraught history of female representations, the seduction of the gaze, and perhaps, most notably, touch itself.

In Objet Objet and Wet gold passion, the smooth equine surface of a horse’s back or a bead of sweat against the breast become sensual and erotic. Threading together these reoccurring surfaces gives form to an economy of touch that unsettles the limits of subjecthood, desire, and sexual intimacy. Both the contoured leather patina of a high heeled shoe and the toned ripples of vigorous musculature suggest a tactile turn. Tactility, as both an affective experience and an art historical theme is central here; these haptic works almost dare us to touch them.