Valérie Mannaerts

In her work, Valérie Mannaerts extends the method of collage to spatial objects. She explores the physiognomic qualities of things, questioning the relation between organic and inorganic forms, the presence and autonomy of objects as well as the histories sedimented within them. Mannaerts has worked with materials as diverse as wood, bronze, ceramics, textile, paint, papier-mâché and paper, creating hybrid, contradictory and precarious forms that are at once open to chance and formally circumscribed. Her work explores the borderline between image and object, reminiscent of surrealist and later feminist preoccupations with material and image culture, corporeality and states of consciousness.The constellations she stages implicate the visitor in a realm of suspense, as if on a theatre stage in which the scenography has taken the lead. Indeed, not unlike actors and their split-consciousness on stage, the works in Mannaerts' aesthetic universe exist equally in conflicting registers, simultaneously suspending the distinction between essence and appearance, constructing artifice and natural form into dynamic relations. This is expressed through a play with scales and scapes, layers, patterns and distorted dimensions, folding and arresting the flow of time in one moment, giving way to imaginary flights in the other. Between defined and undefined form, proximity and distance, the strange and familiar, there emerges a morphology of which the work of Mannaerts gives a unique and idiosyncratic articulation.(Fragments from a text by Anselm Franke)