GARANCE VALLÉE

Almine Rech gallery is pleased to present Tous ces objets qui n'en sont pas, Garance Vallée's first monographic show in Paris,from June 30 to July 29, 2023. Best known for her total work–merging the territories of architecture, art and design toexplore new relationships between body, space and objects, as well as their connection with domesticity, everyday lifeand intimacy - French artist Vallée constantly seeks to rethink the place of humankind in its environment and itsreconciliation with nature. With a casual dexterity that is the hallmark of her unashamedly eclectic generation,unfettered by the rules of architectural design, she deploys every dimension of a holistic, decompartmentalised universe.Like so many clues unfolding in space, her paintings resemble architectural renderings, their deliberately truncatedperspectives overflowing into reality. In advancing her patterns of ambiguousness between painting and installation, realand digital, inside and out, Vallée wilfully straddles the chasm of today's digital world, somewhere between physical andvirtual spaces.

Her show Tous ces objets qui n'en sont pas (All these objects that are not objects) constitutes an immersive platform thattoys with notions of storefronts for space itself. As it creates new perspectives, her reversible storefront–a kind of 'doublewindow' onto the world - can equally be approached from the inside and from the street. Her paintings make inroads intointimate spheres, where privacy and habitat can be seen as a 'symbol of confinement, but also a source of self-reinvention', in the words of the artist. Vallée plays with the paradox of a closed space allowing an open mind toquestions the function of the domestic in the digital, post-Covid age, echoing the increasingly porous distinction betweenpublic and private, between the outside and the intimate. Within closed spaces devoid of human presence, the objectsare infused with promises of travels, of dreams, like so many affirmations of form and matter rather than function. 'Theobjects are depicted in the same way as a human figure would, like a family portrait loaded with personal symbols'.

Garance Vallée's installations invite viewers to weave in and out of her paintings, to become fully immersed in her visualworld, to project themselves entirely into her works, to inhabit them. In this, the age of the Metaverse, she subtly playson the ambiguities of our time to upend our conceptions of reality. By throwing off the shackles of perspective andconventions of architectural representation in her quest for new utopias, she has gained the ability to imagine miniatureworlds as new forms of habitats. Thus brought closer to the objects depicted, our body too becomes an object among somany others. 'The object becomes the subject'.

Press release courtesy Almine Rech. Text: Jérôme Sans.