The River

Galerie Pact, Paris

June-July 2023

Press release written by Andrew Woolbright

For The River, Margaux Valengin initiates her expressionistic flourish into the language of literal traffic–the interstitial spaces of highway lanes and median divides. Produced during her time at the Sharpe Walentas Residency in New York, Valengin has trained her attention on the car and specifically, its American associations with desire and freedom. Through a process of digital collaging, the artist forms intimacies and tensions within digital and physical abstraction, a motif that also allows her to negotiate what is shared and what is occluded between nature and the urban sprawl. By pairing her sourced imagery with gesture, Valengin interjects her figural mark to bring body awareness back into the image, as she investigates the sensory experiences of passing through the reflective surfaces of cities, of being stuck in traffic, and of the car crash.
Valengin’s abstraction works through multiple modes. In works like Sol (2023), the large green lattice structure gives the impression of the neo-pop painting-image relationships adopted by Kippenberger, Baldessari, or Kelley. In this case the artist’s abstraction is a confrontation that withholds the image from us, denies Gestalt. However, in works like The Wheel (2023) or Riviere (2023), the marks form veils around the shine and edge of the highway and the carwreck. Through this language, Valengin is able to trace the periphery of the politics inherent to car culture, from the racial politics and authoritarian design of the highway as it was constructed by Robert Moses, to the alienation and atomization the experience of driving produces in relief to public transportation. Valengin’s mark explores a kind of metaphysical excess within each image, defining what is shed from each crumpled car or fast, translucent reflection. In understanding the car’s complicated symbolic relationship to the American dream, Valengin recirculates its desire while yearning for new intimacies of connection and human presence.