My creations reveal my aesthetic emotions as well as my inner perpetual questioning about human identity, throughout existential hurts and the process of constant rebirth.
– Valérie Telesca
Packet8
Born in Lille, France, Valérie Telesca lives and works in France. Her plastic project focuses on the idea of packaging in its allegorical meaning of “social ornament”, but more specifically revolves around its paradoxes. Interpreted in its primary sign origin, this packaging becomes alternately the cocoon announcing the birth, the plastic ecstasy of a metamorphosis, or a lure capable of modifying the identity by a change of shape. In her work of art, the matters are exploited as substances which are strongly metamorphic or, on the contrary, exposed in a starkness which makes them sacred.
After having worked for a long time on the colour considered as a second skin which socializes the matter, the artist anchors her approach in an identity dimension : That of the nature of things and of their metamorphosis, in its exuberance and its fragility.
Valérie Telesca expresses herself in the very matter of her object stemming from the packaging of which she modifies the resistance.Contrary to a claim of ephemeral art, her works of art fall within the dynamics of a time which makes them accomplish the challenge of lasting.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Born in France in 1968, I have Italian origins. First a photographer, then a painter, I have worked for a long time on the colour considered as a second skin which socializes the matter. My plastic project now focuses on materials as strongly metamorphic substances.
I was not born an artist. In fact, my calling came quite late and unexpectedly. I have found my own techniques through work and experimentation. Every artist is an alchemist researcher…
Where do you gather most of the inspiration for your works?
In my artistic career, photography was a first stage. It taught me a certain sensibility as well as a perception of measures. It also gave me a kind of “adjustment” of my vision to the world: its shapes and its colours.
My approach articulates around the concept of “packaging”, in its allegorical dimension, as a social finery distorting the nature of things. My questioning concerns its limits and its contradictions, its capacity to hide, to transform or to reveal the internal material. This came throughout my journeys abroad, observing people…
Package
Which of your artwork pieces is your favorite?
All my “series” correspond to states of my life. I have a preference for the series ” Nude ” which represents what it would remain, once the skin removed. The envelope merges with the internal matter, naked. Reign of the no color or the absolute, ostentatious and assumed color, freed from the codes of the sociability. This series looks like me a little.
Nude
What do you think the artist is in society?
That of raising questions in sharing a sensitive perception of the world that we all compose. Experimentation is a kind of resistance, a resilience. To overtake the limits, open new doors, wonder about what is beyond the experience, to refuse the comfort for a risk which is maybe worth it. The art is for me a vehicle for communication in interacting with the others who express their own emotions and comment on mine. We learn a lot from each other..
What’s the best thing about being a woman artist?
…Would you ask a man what’s the best thing about being a male artist…?
What is the most difficult part of being a female artist?
To be obliged to define myself as a “female” artist…!
In fact, I was the co-founder and of an association of women. The aim was to help women in developing their professional independent activity, considering that women have more difficulty in dealing with their career as they have to deal with many other tasks.
How do you manage in such a situation?
We have to surpass ourselves…
Did you ever feel like giving up?
Everyday! Then everyday makes me understand that art IS my life…You don’t decide to do art. Art snatches you up.
Installation
How do you look at your previous pieces?
They are part of my process. I consider them a step that made me grow up.
How does your cultural background affect your work?
For me, the “matter adventure” is first of all a perception of the world, a propensity to look beyond the surface, open the dialog which opens the field of the possible.
I am native from a South where the ground, both feeder and engulfing, shapes the aesthetics of the landscape and there the matter dresses an identity dimension. That of the nature of things. That of the vital metamorphosis.
My creations reveal my aesthetic emotions as well as my inner perpetual questioning about human identity, throughout existential hurts and the process of constant rebirth.
Cocoons
What is your dream project?
A monumental installation in the beautiful, exceptional landscape of Basilicata, in Italy, My homeland.
What is up and coming for you, as projects?
I am working on a project with two other Italian artists about the concept of Chrysalis.
I should expose at the Marrakech contemporary museum, then in Trieste (Italy) in 2014.
What do you want to do next?
Sculpture !
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