France

Cesar del Valle

Art is nothing but illusion.

The artist creates images, not reality : as successful as it may be, an imitation of Nature is only a picture of it.

Cesar del Valle does not think one can turn something into real through the tricks of artistic creation. A drawn object does not exist outside of its first nature of drawing. It does not have its own reality. It is only an intellectual creation.

Though, quite often, we allow ourselves to dream while either reading, or watching a movie or looking at a painting. We would like to believe that this picture could have another reality and for a while we accept to ban the physical barriers which make incompatible facts and fantasy.

But then the artist will sharply draw our attention to our distraction.

« The nature of the characters I am drawing is graphite. The world in which they evolve is paper. The graphite characters are interacted with their paper world : livened by life, they play with their environment, are run over by folds of cellulose, remain right on the edge. Of graphite… Their depth comes from a double interaction between the characters and their worlds as well as the subject and its support. Then I create an abstraction which goes over their initial state. However, they are and they remain graphite lines on paper ».

Cesar del Valle’s characters always are on their own, evolving in indefinite radiant white circles. They never look at possible spectators.  They have no consciousness of being observed. They even seem not to be conscious of their own existence.

And though, it seems that they are almost about to get out of their frames and take shape in front of us. They are somewhat like the witch of Jorge Luis Borges’ book entitled « The circular ruins » who is surprised, as he gets surrounded by a violent fire which destroys his house, not to be consumed by flame. Then, with relief, humiliation and horror, the witch realizes that he too is only an appearance, an intellectual creation, the result of somebody else’s dream, of another world : he is only the character of a novel.


Cesar del Valle delicately questions our relation to the world and to artworks, the perception of our environment and the limits of our imagination with a tremendous technical dexterity, a soft but precise line, playing on different levels of consciousness.

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