Valérie de Berardinis

Painter living in Paris, I returned to painting in 2017 after forty years of silence. Very young, the loss of my father — a painter — made me grow up with a broken artistic transmission. Then a childhood between Italy and West Africa gave me a taste for otherness and shaped my sensitivity for transcultural inspirations. Studies in Applied Arts at the Estienne school in typographic creation made me discover the engagement of the body in the line through rhythm and breath. In 2004, I began practicing Japanese martial arts, with the intuition that the rigor of these disciplines and the study through the repetition of gesture would bring me a physical grounding in the act of painting. It became a subject of my painting twenty years later. Since 2019, my painting has been shown in individual and collective exhibitions and in 2026, the Artothèque de Paris 11e arr. acquired one of my paintings.

Entering painting is a commitment of the body, a shift towards an underlying truth where the gesture must precede the meaning. Painting is not just a technique, it is my medium — my language — my way of putting the fundamental at the center and entering into dialogue with my subjects, my inspirations, to move and open perception.

My recurring themes — wavering between the limits of the visible and the invisible — touch upon portraiture, self-portraiture, and also spaces or objects to consecrate, question, not to forget. 

The subject is centered, frontal, in dialogue, often vertical, composed of perceptible colored touches, to tell the story and bear witness to what has been. This ritualized and often serial process relies on quick-drying techniques and a vivid line — acrylic, inks, wax or dry pastels — unfolding on large and small formats, on canvas as well as paper.

The serial work stretches the time of experience, defines a space where each painting becomes the witness and guardian of the path traveled.