TEXTE / VORTRÄGE / PODIEN AUSSTELLUNGEN / PROJEKTE BÜCHER

Valérie Favre’s image series Valérie Favre’s various groups of works are all related to one another. One series has spawned the next since 1989, some running parallel, some creating antitheses. Favre’s series of images, composed of four, eighteen or several dozen canvases and works on paper result from equally short, clearly defined working periods or, equally, a lingering thematic or methodological interest, continued over many years. Series and groups are developed as an argumentative context. In Favre’s eyes, each individual canvas is a single move within a larger game, embedded in a relational discourse with other canvases in the same or in another group of works. Image is interwoven with image. The conceptual inquiry surrounding different temporal and narrative levels of painting is revealed to be the main preoccupation fuelling Favre’s extensive œuvre. The painter presents an intellectual work in progress in consistently powerful, passionate, imaginative and original images. She decelerates her »mises en scenes« by making the static material of painting a visual space that performs constantly changing, recalcitrant movements entailing an open number of possible, unfixable narratives – narratives, in which the artistic means simultaneously assume the roles of chauffeur, protester and fool. Over recent years, Favre has grown increasingly interested in the temporal nature of the cinema, its visual semantics and narrative performance. Her emblematic artistic figure, the »Lapine Univers«, made its début on stagelike landscapes as a direct result, the artist creating perspectives and constructing her visual space as a fictional event. Favre’s most striking narrative figure, the »Lapine Univers (Universal Bunny Girl)« has appeared in almost 100 pictures since 1999. The hybrid female figure with long hare-like ears is a pert mythical creature, a cross between a pin-up girl, a cartoon character and a resistance fighter, perambulating through canvases and largescale oil paintings on paper. She reflects representative feminine figureheads which surface as mascots, heroines and antiheroines in contemporary media culture as much as the role of the artist herself. In French, »La Pine« is a play on words, here referring to the paintbrush as a female penis in the hand of the painter, a magic wand which sires worlds, figures and stories. The ironic figure of the »Lapine Univers« thus serves Valérie Favre’s own image production apparatus as mirror image, logo, anti-logo and ironic auto-commentary in one. In her smallscale painting entitled »Lapine Univers Columbia« (2004/2006), Favre replaces the triumphant female figure in the logo used by US media enterprise Colombia Pictures with her own creation, thus challenging, typically tongue-in-cheek, the monopoly of »universal« art work. »Universal Studios« is subjected to a similar assault: Favre thumbs her nose at Hollywood’s industrial storytellers with her personal, artistic narrative space and her figures’ respective milieus – with the »Lapine Univers« as front man. The titles of both the pictures and the exhibitions as a whole articulate Favre’s call to establish her own version, a personal alternative, a private resistance or an unknown addition, to global, now non-committal major narratives, irrespective of whether these take the form of fairytales, films, novels or art history. Valérie Favre invites her audience to enter the space of rangy, largescale narrative constructions like »The Third Brother Grimm« (2004 – 2006), and spend time there. How is it possible to shift the flow of time from a filmic narrative into the still and enduring perception of a static image? Favre’s work triggers a period of perception in which painting’s silent narrative content is pitted against the timebased film and theatre spectacle. A good example is the single second of film she appropriates for »Autos in der Nacht« (Cars at night, started in 2002), dissecting it into twentyfour separate canvases which the viewer encounters in the exhibition, image by image. On the other hand, the series of images entitled »Balls and Tunnels« is an utter antithesis by comparison. Favre has been painting one picture for this series of images, which she began in 1995, every year since 1999. The titles and structures of these invariably abstract compositions ironize the myths and omnipotent fantasies of artistic creative power. Here, the rule of chance prevails. In these images, the »Balls« and »Tunnels« take the form of testicles and vulvas, planets and text holes, blots and maelstroms of colour, the entire universe, in short – and yet merely a daubed mass. Favre’s annual ritual creation of these images humorously impedes her personal narrative gesture. Yet the abstract, inkdrenched images function as a contrapunctal hinge within her œuvre, around which the figurative-narrative motifs turn just like two parts of one sentence can turn around a comma. The series entitled »The Prayer« underlines current political Catch-22s in the four paintings completed so far and concurrently recapitulates Favre’s attitude to painting. An eagle – emblem of power, pride and militarism – lies on the floor on a small carpet. A radiator in the background hints at a somewhat frugal interior. The creature’s left wing is submerged in a large yellow glove, ready for action – provided that it can keep its fingers clean. This is naturally a real handicap for the poor bird. Free flight and free will are replaced by paralysis, absurdity and defeat at one’s own (wrong)doing. The proud beak is rendered speechless and powerless, sunk in selfinflicted capitulation, on a small prayer mat. Praying for what? Valérie Favre’s series of paintings reflect principles of construction in visual narra-tion. The paintings’ surface is conceptualised as a place of performance in which various narrative approaches to painting are stagemanaged like theatre scenes. Here, figure and landscape, historical reference and free fiction, material and style, choice of format and brush motion are the pictures’ actors, playing out a customised role. If we chart Favre’s work over the years, she appears to have followed feminist constructivism, arguing that it is role allocation and repetition of this kind which comes to constitute the actions and narratives of the image. To misjudge the existence and the nature of roles like these results in redundant image reproduction. On the other hand, the individual who writes the script for the same roles becomes the author of the resultant images – in the sense of an emancipatory project. Alexander Koch Translation: Harriet Spence