The elegant Art Nouveau harmony of Valérie Arvalys' artworks,

where material meets refinement



 By Marta Lock

International Art Critic

The tendency to observe aesthetic balance, understood as the connection between exterior form and the intensity of opening oneself to the extraordinary beauty of the everyday, seems to have lost its importance in a contemporary creative world where the priority is to observe, to contest, to oppose the reality of living or, on the contrary, to renounce any connection with the observed in order to tend towards the restlessness or the deepest sensations that leave little room for taste towards figurative harmony. Nevertheless, there are some artists, original and courageous, who choose to pursue certain themes theorised in the last century by adapting them to their own expressive personality and introducing the innovations of movements subsequent to their chosen style but preceding their own creative beginnings. Today's protagonist chooses to take a leap back in time through a personal language that brings to an artistic phase that marked an important passage in the cultural world of the recent past.

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, European society was witnessing a strong industrialisation, thus a tendency to move towards a flattening of the characteristics of the individual as well as towards new technologies of mass reproduction that risked taking away humanity from man and in fact from the craftsman himself who until a few years before did not have to compete with machines capable of doing his work faster. This is how Arts and Crafts was born in England, an artistic movement that proposed to merge art and craftsmanship into a single style, elevating the latter to a first-rate creation, thus protecting it from the risk of being outclassed by mechanisation, and expanding the possibilities of the former by granting the executors of the artworks the opportunity to learn new techniques with which to enrich and give a unique touch to creations in which aesthetic taste and harmony of forms was so present as to become a distinctive mark.

The Arts and Crafts guidelines became a true pictorial current a few years later, initially in Belgium and then in all European nations where its evolution took on a different name depending on the artists' country of origin. Art Nouveau in France, Jugendstijl in Germany, Sezessionstijl in Austria, Stile Liberty in Italy and Modernism in Spain, were just some of the definitions given to the new artistic approach characterised by a strong decorative inclination, on a floral basis because inspired by nature but enriched with gold leaf, as in the extraordinary paintings of Gustav Klimt, by the presence of charming, innocent women as in the ethereal works of Alfons Mucha, by the architectural visions of Antoni Gaudí to the ornamental and sinuous stained glass windows of Victor Horta. In fact, Art Nouveau also touched on interior decoration, glass creations and jewellery, laying the foundations for the immediately following Art Deco, which prided itself on a more luxurious, opulent approach, perhaps to somehow celebrate the end of the first war period that had wrought so much destruction. In the latter, too, the characteristic was to spread, thus becoming a multi-disciplinary style in the same way as the earlier Art Nouveau had been. Just as multifaceted is the creative approach of the masters of the past from which she is inspired as that of the French artist Valérie Arvalys, who encapsulates the original spirit of Art Nouveau, that of extending art to various forms of expression, to different materials on which to infuse an elegant and refined touch, introducing however a new concept, that of the material element that would be experimented a few decades later especially with Informal Art.

But Arvalys also drew on Art Deco, for hers attraction to glamour, the sparkle of fine living, for the voluptuous elegance of which Tamara de Lempicka was a great interpreter and undisputed queen, and for the unquestionable crystalline malia noticeable in the architecture of which there are majestic examples, particularly in the American skyscrapers; the French artist's artworks are characterised by the splendour of the surfaces enriched with stones that become an integral part of the canvas, as much as by the use of fabrics and threads that look like real embroidery, which flank the gaze towards nature that reveals the sensitive delicacy of the artist, that spontaneity with which she guides the observer towards a universe that is balanced, poetic and harmonious in its disarming beauty.

What lies at the heart of Valérie Arvalys' art is the research that goes beyond the two-dimensionality of the image, because the sumptuousness and elegance of her works, the result of that mixture between the royalty of Art Deco and the floral and faunal richness of Art Nouveau, needs to be even more emphasised by virtue of the interaction with matter, as if it were to be underlined by the roughness of the inserts of metals, rhinestones, stones and pearls set in the same way as jewellery, dried flowers, feathers, fabrics, leather and clay, and able to envelop her artistic creations in a retro atmosphere. Nature thus becomes a bewitching world to be discovered with a different gaze, with that aesthetic approach that characterised the luxurious style of the early 20th century and that is still able to fascinate the observer, leading him to imagine a bygone era when everything seemed to be less complicated than the present day.

Arvalys' inquisitive nature drives her to measure herself not only with multiple materials but also with different surfaces, from wood to glass, from canvas to clay, precisely in pursuit of that idea, constituting the basis of Art Nouveau, according to which the artist could draw on manual craftsmanship by transforming techniques to adapt them to his own creative nature. The result is enthralling precisely because it takes the observer on a real journey through time, attracted by the beauty of the gold leaf backgrounds on which elegant yet unreal tones are outlined and juxtaposed, as in the artwork Printemps, where the flowers are splendid decorative elements made protagonists of the enchantment of nature, as if they were posing to give a charming aspect to everything that revolves around them, the base of the ground and the stems from which they bloom; Valérie Arvalys literally embroiders her artworks by mixing, as in this case, acrylic colour with the pearl-like stones that structure the leaves, with the jewelled chain that defines the contours, with the turquoise pebbles with which she fills the contours of the frame as well as the bases of the flowers.

Everything contributes to instilling in the observer a feeling of sophistication and magnetic refinement that induces him to get closer to discover the details but at the same time to step back to admire the overall image.

In the work Complicité, the artist is inspired by the colours of the lake and the vegetation where the splendid peacocks are usually to be found, making them the protagonists, enveloping and transforming the surrounding reality with the magnificent colours of their plumage; in this artwork, Arvalys draws on the idea of Andy Warhol's multiples, that characteristic of dividing the canvas into four or more quadrants within which to highlight his iconic divas of the 1950s, and adapts it to her own artistic intentions by modifying it, in turn dividing the space into four quadrants within which she places her subjects two by two, on the one hand highlighting the opulence that the peacock normally represents, and on the other hand flanking it with a stylisation of the richness of the vegetation in which the splendid bird plunges and which seems to recall its hues.

In Harpe Deco, on the other hand, Valérie Arvalys shows all her inclination towards aesthetic balance, the magnificence that distinguished the pictorial and architectural style that passed like a meteor, leaving however incredible traces of itself; the harp is transformed by the artist into a sumptuous decoration that seems to associate itself with the magic of the notes generated by the instrument with which wealthy people loved to entertain themselves.

Beautiful living, charm and elegance are the hallmarks of the works of Valérie Arvalys, who loves to measure herself not only with painting but also with photography and poetry; daughter of art, her father and grandfather were painters, she has taken part in many group exhibitions in France, including Barbizon and the Saint Germain district in Paris, and in international fairs, gaining success among both the public and the art world. She recently received the Award for Technique and for the quality and creativity of her works at the ART Show Bastille Paris.