Bigger Pleasures

“The painting was made at my family home, over the course of winter. The source imagery, largely reinterpreted, was a Cutthroat eel suffering from a toxic shock at the bottom level of a brine pool.” - Valentin Rilliet, 2021

Valentin Rilliet’s artistic practice discloses an ongoing dialogue between the personal and the political through a recollection of memory and personal archives. In conversation between realism and folklore, his work often depicts strange and ghostly figures settled in a dreamlike atmosphere. Subjects rotate between popular references, symbolic potentiality and anthropomorphism as a way to personify a conceptual position or an emotional state.

Driven by his dual-heritage and the idea of appropriation, Valentin likes to investigate how visual art has been used as a tool of persuasion as well as self-questioning through history, consequently acting as a simulacra for image-making.

Valentin was born in Geneva, (1996, Switzerland) from a Swiss father and a Chinese mother. 

Accolades

Education: BFA in Fine Arts (First-class hons) at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL

Exhibitions: 2020 Visionaries, A Space for Art, London 2020. Solo representation, Zetter Hotel, Clerkenwell, London 2020. Slade Degree Showcase, online group showcase, 2020. Spaceship Dungeon Zoo, Hackney, London 2019. 18/11/1, PMQ, Hong Kong 2019. Bridge, Izo Art Gallery, Moscow, Russia 2018.

@valentinrilliet
valentinrilliet.com