VALENTINE DARDEL: RADIANT CONTOURS

Valentine Dardel’s practice evolves through contrast-between digital and analogue, between the ethereal and the visceral. Now based in London, the French artist moves fluidly across disciplines, with roots in textile and illustration informing a painterly language that is tactile, lyrical, and deeply intuitive.

While trained as a designer, Dardel approaches image-making with an emotional logic. Her surfaces are neither rigid nor decorative; they oscillate between control and spontaneity. Brushstrokes, fields of colour, and scraped textures suggest forms just out of reach-figures submerged in memory, or landscapes glimpsed from the edge of consciousness. Through repetition and reworking, her paintings remain in motion: layered, luminous, and alive.

Diptych (2024)

Diptych continues Dardel’s ongoing investigation into the thresholds between control and disruption. Each panel-modest in scale yet visually assertive-operates as a spatial compression of gestural residue. The surface is not built through image, but through impact: dragging, scraping, imprinting. These marks, often sharp and angular, intersect with irregular areas of pigment that pulse across the linen like scorched impressions.

Dardel’s technique resists painterly illusion. Instead, it is indexical. Her process leaves behind raw graphic traces of movement-intensely physical yet composed. Layers of acrylic are applied with alternating pressure: dense in some sections, nearly transparent in others. This fluctuation in material density creates a dynamic push-pull between presence and erosion, between texture and silence.

The palette-vivid vermilion against steely grey-holds tension in stasis. The space does not expand; it vibrates. Negative space is not passive, but active: it interrupts, absorbs, resists. These works, though minimal in construction, manifest an energy that feels cumulative-an unresolved standoff between mark and void.

Here, the act of painting becomes a temporal record: a negotiation between intention and accident, surface and action. In Dardel’s hands, the painting is not a window or a picture, but a site-where material memory accumulates, and where stillness is never entirely still.

Diptych, 2024, Linen stretched on pine canvas, acrylic paint, 75 × 40 cm

Selfportrait Blue (2024)

In Selfportrait Blue, Dardel continues her exploration of form through minimal figuration. Painted in oil on a larger 120 × 80 cm canvas, the figure is constructed from wide, undulating contours and enclosed within cool, blue tonal fields. Unlike Diptych, the composition here introduces more negative space, yet the emotional density remains.

The figure floats in a field of blue-not deep, but enveloping. Texture is subtle but felt. Broad brushwork keeps the surface responsive, while the asymmetric body form maintains compositional tension. There is no attempt to mimic the body exactly. The work finds its identity in how the form holds together under pressure.

Here, stillness is never static. The figure feels paused rather than frozen. A limb curves inward; a torso folds softly. The body is readable, but never literal. This is a self-portrait not in likeness, but in posture-a kind of internal architecture built from light and containment.

Selfportrait Green (2024)

Selfportrait Green offers a tonal counterpoint. Though formally similar in scale and structure to Selfportrait Blue, its green palette and expanded negative space shift the atmosphere entirely. The figure here feels more open-less compressed, more observational-but the tension persists.

Lines remain clean but unsteady, resisting symmetry and suggesting vulnerability. Green is not used emotively, but structurally-anchoring the body and grounding the composition. Colour blocks create shape, but also silence. The work plays with balance: visual density on one side, emptiness on the other. A perceptual rhythm builds through the space between limbs, the distance from edge to edge.

Unlike traditional portraiture, this piece doesn’t seek to reveal the artist’s character. Instead, it communicates condition: the quiet complexity of being observed and constructed at once.

Dardel’s recent works in oil mark a return to material presence, but her conceptual concerns remain rooted in the digital: how images behave, how space is felt, and how stillness can hold energy. In Diptych, Selfportrait Blue, and Selfportrait Green, she explores the figure not as a subject, but as a structure-shaped by light, pressure, and chromatic rhythm.

What defines these paintings is not their resolution, but their restraint. The figures breathe without moving. The surfaces pulse without noise. Dardel creates tension not through drama, but through careful distortion-through what is withheld just as much as what is shown.

Her work invites a slower kind of looking. And in that quiet, meaning emerges.

Images: © Valentine Dardel, Courtesy of the Artist

 Editor: Mal H