Valentin Ranger

"At the turn of the 16th century, Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch painted his celebrated oak panel The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych depicting the fundamental Biblical myths, from the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to the horrors reserved in hell for sinful souls. In this major work, humans, demons and giant animals abound in a lush environment, some caught in the grip of lust and gluttony, others of anger and punishment. Four centuries later, this abundance finds its echo in the work of the young French artist Valentin Ranger : though freed from the religious fervour of his Dutch predecessor, Ranger likewise gives pride of place to pleasure, desire and excess, his phantasmagorical world teeming with spermatozoa-shrubs, woman-heifers, phallic fruit and butterfly-men, all of whom coexist harmoniously to the point of physically merging in euphoric scenes entirely devoid of hostility.

Currently a student at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, Ranger happily describes the landscapes of his imagination as a “vast opera,” which isn’t so surprising given that he initially envisaged a career on stage. During his theatre training, Ranger first of all found the confidence he needed to accept himself as he was, before coming up against the limits of the human body and regretting the lack of diversity on stage. As if in response, his artistic practice allows him to bring into being the characters that were missing, something he initially achieved through drawing and later through 3D animation and ceramics. More complementary than supplementary, all of these mediums open innumerable doors via which this autodidact can explore the infiniteness of his own imagination and decode its mysteries, be it through pastels and coloured pencils or the aluminium plates he engraves to create astonishing ex-votos. While he acknowledges inspiration from some of the greats – Brancusi, Cocteau, Ernst –, Ranger doesn’t deny the influence of pop culture, from Barbie to Zelda and Pokémon. Recurrent in his works, non-gendered characters with heart-shaped heads are the guardians of a hybrid wonderland whose acid-coloured organic decor draws us in like children to a sweetshop, before losing us its delights."

Matthieu Jacquet - Numero Art Magazine 2021

(picture copyright Timothée Chambovet)

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