Valentin Carron

Valentin Carron is from Switzerland, a country of deeply rooted traditions. His work explores those
traditions, probing how they function
in an age of increasingly globalised
consumerism. He takes symbolically
charged images and wittily reformulates them to expose their originality – a word that now sounds rather hollow
in our globalised world. Carron uses art in an intelligent way to challenge
traditions, expose their identity and
connect them with life today. It turns out, for example, that the Alps were ‘invented’ around 1900, when Switzerland profiled itself at the World’s Fair and struck a chord that launched 
the tourism industry. In the 1930s and
1950s the Swiss went a step further
inventing what Valentin Carron calls
‘Heidiland-style’. Sentimentally or not, he unravels, investigates, and dissects this style in search of its ironic
core. He reconstructs the special,
artfully manufactured glass walls with
which wealthy Switzerland got such an attention back in the 1950s. His
goal is to remove the very last veil of
sentimentality and give the viewer a
cool, analytical version of reality - art as analysis.