Sang Tu Erres

Galerie Pact, Paris

September -October 2020

Press release written by Svetlana Kitto 

The title of Margaux Valengin’s show, Sang Tu Erres, in the artist’s first language of French, translates to Blood You Wander. Margaux Valengin often makes use of titles and symbols to energize her paintings with meanings and alchemies that are neither easy to find nor finite in number. Adding a comma, the title could be read as both an address and an accusation—Blood, You Wander—referencing both the inescapability of violence and the challenge to fight it. Additionally, Valengin often uses images of blood and the body in her paintings to valorize emotions, which she calls “bodily thinking”; indeed, the bodies she presents here are often in a state of reflective yet urgent action. Read phonetically, the title also sounds like the French sanctuaire, or sanctuary; a reserve, refuge—a place for protection, healing and respite. With Sang Tu Erres, Valengin, like the female Surrealists before her, creates an impossible, fluid dream-scape, or sanctuary, outside of time and reality, of culture and civilization, of capitalism and patriarchy, where unlikely images and media are juxtaposed and reimagined, and where the quality of class and gender bondage can be named and located, as well as confronted, battled, overturned.

In one of the larger paintings in the show, Folle, which translates to crazy woman, and refers to the concept of hysteria and gendered mental illness, a trio of horses with bridles and bits in their mouths try to break free against the backdrop of what looks like a hunting dog with a chain around its neck. From the Michelangelo sky descends a witchy feminine hand, as if to disrupt this farcical “civilization”, and is printed with yet more horses, these ones wild and free. Like female Surrealist Leonora Carrington, Valengin uses horses and other organic symbols to both stand in for the vital potential of young women, and convey hostility towards the male authority and social constraints that snuff this energy out. In the painting Mors Hardcord, which translate to “horse bit” and hard “rope,” we see a pair of woman’s legs in heels and stockings, a vintage image straight out of a 1940s classic film, ensnared with ropes and an ominous horse bit. Here again, Valengin explores similar themes of female objectification and oppression, bringing together incongruent images and symbols to imagine escape. In The Newly Born Woman, named for Hélène Cixous’ book by the same name, a naked violet woman is trapped inside what could be ropes of intestines, the arterial framework of a heart, or the stifling ridges of a brain. Like all of the paintings in Sang Tu Erres, it offers multiple readings and stories. For Valengin, the possibility of many interpretations is itself an expression of resistance.

The nine paintings in Sang Tu Erres desire away from Cartesian modes of thinking that separate the body from the mind, and towards the work of feminist- Marxist thinkers like Sylvia Federici and Cixous, who looked to women’s language and bodies as sites of profound knowledge and radical collectivity. The world of Valengin’s paintings celebrate organic forms: animals; plants; bodily organs, fluids and musculature; while also depicting the social structures that constrain them. Taken together, the surrealist montages suggest that it is within these traditionally feminine forms that our collective liberation lies, espousing the idea that Federici puts forth in Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women: “on the meaning of witchcraft, the magic is: ‘We know that we know.’”