Feminin

The first solo representation of the work of Valentina Cameranesi

The scene is set in a former hairdresser’s, an environment, which allows for paying attention to oneself. Valentina Cameranesi’s still life, which includes vases, fabrics, and photographs, inspires nostalgia for the 1980s. It was a time when hair was typically heavily styled, blocky shapes defined interiors, and people were not afraid of eccentric appearances.

The title of the show is taken from the remaining stickers of the window facade. It is the ideal reference to Valentina Cameranesi’s work, which deals with a perception of femininity, from an era when women were more confident, sensual, and elegant, before they started to emulate men in fashion and outward appearance in order to look more powerful.

In the eighties vases were a plethora of curvy ceramics that graced many table and shelf tops during the decade. Valentina Cameranesi drew her first vase in 2011, after a museum visit in Rome.

She remembers being saddened due to a personal conclusion but simultaneously feeling inspired by it.

In the following year, she continues to let her emotions draw variations of symbolic and decorative vessels until she was introduced to a supplier in the Veneto, in Northern Italy, where she produced her first set of vases in 2012. The transformation of a drawing, an abstract idea, into a ceramic object was new to Valentina and gave her an unexpected sense, complementing her work as art director and stylist. Another example of Valentina’s aesthetic understanding, is the pastel coloured, blue-shaded, expressive Jacquard. Made according to an industrial weaving technique, it also offers a possibility to translate her imagined, hand drawn ideas into visual patterns. There is a difference between what she drew and what the machines produced since it creates an abstract and uncontrollable version of it, manipulated by the technique. It is a process that she describes as "a romance with digital embroidery".

The medium which captures Valentina Cameranesi’s daily work is photography.

Here she creates environments that frame her client’s products and objects for means of representation. It is a very familiar method that she usually conducts in collaboration.

One could say Valentina Cameranesi is looking for an artistic lexicon of shapes, colours and ornaments. Her themes are elaborated with a great profusion of nostalgia — visually elegant; often decoratively beautiful — referencing the issues of female identity. The production of images of objects is important to her in order to create these memories. Today the L’Oreal woman from the late seventies is no longer present anymore, but remembered.

This walk-in picture, a still from a potential film, from which Anjelica Huston possibly just walked out, sums this up. Valentina Cameranesi consciously took time to elaborate on the body of her work. Now it is placed here as a contribution to contemporary nostalgia.

Curated by Matylda Krzykowski