Diptyque Selfportrait 032025, 2022

Valentine Dardel   Emerging artists

Valentine Dardel is a French visual artist based between Paris and London. A graduate of Central Saint Martins and HEAR, her work explores body perception, the memory of materials, and the subjectivity of the gaze. Her universe shifts between abstraction and figuration, in a subtle tension between presence and erasure.

She has exhibited at the Musée du Papier Peint (Rixheim), Swanfall Gallery (London), and 24Beaubourg (Paris), where she presented Fragments, a performative exhibition in which a 3 × 4 meter painting was cut into 66 pieces and given away to the public. A recipient of the Talents de la Mode program in London, her work is also part of several private collections in France and the UK.

Among her key series, Selfportrait pushes the nude body toward abstraction, transforming skin into matter, light, and mental surface. Empreinte captures spontaneous gestures, blending painting and performance. From one series to the next, color acts as a sensitive thread, echoing her emotions and the presences—both human and territorial—that move through her.

Selfportrait originates from a photographic protocol in which the artist uses her own nude body as a starting point. An honest, intimate, and vulnerable nude, where the folds of the body become the subject. The images are then altered digitally: inverted lights, transformed colors, tightened frames. This process gradually detaches the subject from any immediate reading and slides toward abstraction. The body becomes surface, form, material. By subverting the self-portrait, Valentine Dardel offers a redefinition of the nude—as a form of acceptance and reclaiming of the body.

In the Empreinte series, matter itself becomes a tool. Through the fold, she captures gesture in its raw immediacy, with no going back. Painting differently—in the moment—leaving the trace as a record of movement. These compositions, though seemingly abstract, invite pareidolia: the search for meaning in chaos. The gaze projects, imagines, and guesses at forms. Each trace becomes a shifting space of interpretation.

In Dardel's work, the body becomes material, the material becomes texture, and the texture becomes form. She builds a universe in which each piece seeks to reconnect us with a deeper, more sensitive truth.