Valentin Carron

Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York

Acquired from the above in 2015 by the present owner

Ceuti, La Conservera Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Fibre, Fibre, Austere, Austere, December 2009 - February 2010

I spend entire days making life-size replicas of the objects I abhor…’

-Valentin Carron

(Valentin Carron, quoted in “Adam Jasper, Valentin Carron: Alpine aesthetics and Modernism; Imitation and a boar’s head,” Frieze, Issue 107, May 2007, p. 136).

Growing up in Switzerland, fascinated by the indistinguishability that society places between culture and objects including systems of practice and even food, Valentin Carron questions the systems that have been at place to elicit this thinking through his work. His oeuvre spans widely, recreating existing artworks with new materials, redeveloping and breathing new life into the art of the past, highlighting apparatuses and materials that have fallen into disuse. His work is not to be thought of as copying, but rather dismantling the hierarchy and associations with historical art and present forms in one’s daily life and reimagining them. 

In the present lot, Fibre fibre, austère austère, Carron re-establishes something so common to the land in which he grew up, a structure for storing grain throughout south and central Europe. These plaster structures, severe and rough in appearance, are redefined when created with fibers. As in the entirety of his oeuvre, his work is stripped of its meaning, whether that be of its art historical place or of its cultural and economical function, and re-defined in a nearly humorous way.