Valérie Goutard, (20 May 1967 – 27 October 2016) was a French sculptor who used VAL as her artist's name.
Biography
Val, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine. Her parents were Nathalie Goutard and Jean-Claude Goutard, an engineer working for a large oil company. Because of her father's position, she shared her childhood between Europe, Africa and South America. After studying literature and advertising, she worked in marketing until 2001. In 2002 a friend, Florence Jouglard, an auctioneer and artist, enticed her to try to sculpt from clay.
Working on clay with her own hands, Val felt a revelation, a kind of "love at first sight" for this activity which she perceived as an extension of her inner world. "It was like a revelation, a sort of resurgence of a long-buried memory. My love for sculpture, the material and the volume was born in a completely immediate fashion", she said during an interview in 2014. During two years, Val took art lessons in Paris and then, in August 2004, went to settle in Thailand, where she began working with bronze. Working with this material, Goutard, who took the artist's name of VAL, and emphasized her self-learning. Her relative lack of culture in visual arts brought her, she said, "a freedom vis-à-vis the masters".
In 2007, she met in Bangkok Frédéric Morel, who she in married in 2009. He gave up his work in business to promote VAL's work on the art market.
Through multiple international solo-exhibitions and public installations, VAL became an artist recognized in Asia and Europe. At the end of 2015, she received the Trophée des Français de l’étranger from the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius.
Shortly before the opening of an exhibition of a new series of works at the RedSea Gallery in Singapore, VAL died in a motorbike accident in October 2016 in the Thai province of Chonburi. After her funeral in a Buddhist temple in Bangkok and at the Catholic church of Missions Etrangères de Paris, Bangkok, her ashes were spread on the site of Ocean Utopia, one of her major art works, near Ko Tao.
Artistic career
One of her early works, Miss Trendy, produced in 2004, is a simple 40 centimeters high feminine character, with striking posture, gracefulness and proportions. VAL's works quickly became more elaborate. An early theme was the relationships between a human being and their environment. Many of her early works represent one or several people who are interacting with a given space, represented by a few elements: a bench, a vertical structure or a staircase. This theme of the harmony, of the "balance in the imbalance" was one of the important part of her work. "Finding a kind of balance which emerges with a notion of hope, a fragile balance which also expresses hope", she said. Linked to this theme, also emerged the idea of a journey, of a path on which man progresses, sometimes alone, sometimes along with companions. The idea of a chain appeared, which became a recurring theme during VAL's career, notably in her very last artwork, Du chaos à la sagesse (From Chaos to Wisdom). "We are alone with our own imaginary world and, at the same time, I find in a very curious way that, when we open and look outside, we see that many people, in an isolated way, are going in the same direction. And for me, I have the impression to participate to a chain which completely overtakes us", she explained.
In 2008, the Wellington Gallery in Hong Kong displayed some of her works: it was the first international gallery which got interested by VAL's art pieces. After this, the same gallery organized several solo exhibitions in 2009 and 2010.
After her marriage in 2009, VAL set up a work team, composed of Thai artisans in a workshop in northeastern Bangkok. VAL and her team had her bronze works cast at the Fine Arts Foundry of Ayuthaya. Through the years, she acquired a vast experience while working with the 160 artisans of this foundry, who also worked for other artists. The welding of the bronze pieces was done at the Bangkok workshop – a crucial stage where the orientation of a character, the positioning of hands or the degree of inclination of a head would give to the work its final expression. Several galleries were actively supporting and promoting VAL's works, most prominently the Philippe Staib Gallery in Shanghai and Taipei and the RedSea Gallery in Singapore. The founders of these two galleries, Philippe Staib and Christopher Churcher, who progressively became close friends with VAL and Frédéric, played a crucial role in VAL's career and organized numerous exhibitions of the artist's works, in Taiwan, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi.