Let us remember Matisse's Atelier rouge: the appearance of the background as a subject, where both have the same value and where only the composition counts. With Valentiner too... The first step is to cover the canvas with a coloured network, then to place adhesive strips torn at the ends: they protect the canvas from the following layers, and are the safeguard of the background. The canvas is then completed in an infinite play of colours with intuitive shapes caught in the dynamics of an informal world.
The last step, and it is a pleasure for the eye that looks: the tearing off of the strips! At last, to grasp the motif, to find oneself perhaps in the reversals of the background and the subject. Released into the field, the background, after having circulated invisibly under the surface, disperses it and organises it by authority. It then becomes the surface of the motif, in a word perhaps: I subject.
Let us say that at first sight the "subject" is geometric with hard edges. What makes the painting is indeed the composition, the distribution of these geometric supports. On closer inspection, the colour that settles in is complex (it's that of the first background!), the geometric bands overlap...
Once again caught up in the game, we quickly discover, and this is the project, that each mode of action of this painting can hide another. Unmasked, Valentiner's painting thus plays with its image.
Monique Daubigné