Biography
Valentin van der Meulen is a French Charcoal artist. He starts each artwork with a reflection on an image, and links their reading with reality. These axes express themselves in plastic points of views by cropping, cutting out, contrast and even erasing.
Meulen lends most of his progress works to working from images of print media or internet and sporadically including his own private images, his big drawings represent mostly individuals on a black background. These drawings made with charcoal and black stone seem to lose any context in the image and its subject. The spectator who can't anymore connect them with a precise event or with news which the image in its origin was supposed to represent. These drawings are then partially or totally erased. Destruction or continuity of process of the act of drawing, these erasing are both made in studio or during public interventions.
To erase an image is to erase as much of their subject as the object that's image. Give it a new temporality, make it imperceptible or revealed. Placing the spectator between "what was" and "what remains" the erasing allows to wonder about notions of lack, short-lived, disappearance, memory but also of track and heritage. These notions became today the basis of his work.
Valentin Van Der Meulen’s works can be found in public and private collections across Europe and in various Galleries.
Works
