Poissons entrelacés, 2016

Valérie Le Roux   New & remarkable Artists

Valérie Le Roux is a French creator and artisan based in Concarneau, in Finistère, whose artistic universe is deeply linked to the ocean, light, and the landscapes of Brittany. Her work is characterized by clean graphic design, simplified shapes, and a palette of bright or nuanced colors worked in flat areas. The fish is one of her emblematic motifs, alongside seaweed, crabs, and, more recently, barnacles. Her visual language meets contemporary art, design, art de vivre, and an abstraction inspired by the marine world. Her creations bear a strong attachment to the territory of south Finistère and the aesthetic of her maritime environment.

Valérie Le Roux has been creating since 1992, the year she created her workshop in Concarneau. Until 1999, her activity included painting, engraving, and exhibitions. Between 2001 and 2006, she also dedicated herself to children's illustration. In 2006, the acquisition of a majolica kiln marked an important step in her journey and allowed her to fully develop her work as a ceramist. Until 2020, she also passed on her know-how through plastic arts workshops. In 2020, she opened a shop in Concarneau, near her workshop.

Ceramics now occupy a central place in her practice. Valérie Le Roux works with clay to create unique pieces of decorative and sculptural majolica, as well as limited series of utilitarian and decorative creations: bowls, plates, cups, dishes, coupes, vases, bottles, and salad bowls. Her pieces combine precise artisanal know-how with an immediately recognizable graphic vocabulary. The white glazed earth becomes the support for a drawing built with patience and spontaneity, while the firing reveals luminous and colorful objects.

Her aesthetic is based on sober and simple shapes, non-figurative or progressively stylized motifs, and flat areas of pure colors. Shades of blue, from electric blue to navy blue, mingle with grays, greens, reds, oranges, and yellows. The artist adapts her drawing to the constraints of each support and evolves her motifs through the repetition of gestures, arrangements, and a permanent search for line, color, and contrast. This ability to transpose the same graphic vocabulary onto different materials is one of the particularities of her approach.

Valérie Le Roux's research extends far beyond ceramics. She creates screenprints, lithographs, linocuts, and monotypes. For her screenprints, she collaborates with different workshops to produce numbered small series. Her lithographs and typography are done with the R.L.D. workshop. For her monotypes, she mainly uses linocut, which she associates according to the works with gouache, acrylic ink, pastels, or lead mine. Velin d'Arches and BFK Rives papers can be embossed and dyed by the passage of the roller over the engraved linoleum plate.

Marine flora and fauna constitute an essential repertoire of her work. Seaweed, fish, crabs, and barnacles are transformed, simplified, and sometimes led towards abstraction. In her prints as well as in her ceramics, the naturalistic representation gives way to a personal graphic writing where line, color, and rhythm become the main elements of composition. Her paper work can thus be developed in diptychs or triptychs, while her motifs are also transposed onto objects and decorative supports.

Valérie Le Roux also develops majolica frescoes, at the intersection of paper work and ceramics. She designs compositions of marine flora and fauna intended for interior spaces, combining sketches, color choices, trials, painting, enameling, and firing. Among the works mentioned on her site is a four-square-meter fresco for the restaurant Le Chantier in Concarneau, dedicated to fish, as well as five frescoes of about one square meter for the restaurant Chez Gustave, depicting birds and flowers. These projects demonstrate the architectural and decorative dimension of her creation.

Her work also unfolds on fabric, furniture, and various decorative objects, always with the same desire to preserve a coherent graphic identity. She collaborates notably with professionals (decorators, architects, restaurateurs, hotel owners) to design custom projects. Through ceramics, prints, frescoes, and design, Valérie Le Roux builds a universe where marine art, French artisanal craft, graphic abstraction, and colors of the Breton coast meet. Her work translates an intimate relationship with her territory: art inspired by the sea, light, and natural forms, but constantly reinterpreted by a contemporary, clean, and personal writing.