The sculpture by Val presented in this exhibition is a 1/5th scale version of his masterpiece "From Chaos to Wisdom," which Val sculpted before taking on the challenge of enlarging this monumental work. This artwork is made of bronze and measures 36 meters in length.

It was installed on a hill overlooking the city of Taichung in Taiwan and is probably one of the largest contemporary bronze sculptures in the world.

Through this work, Val describes the inner and philosophical journey that an individual must make to get out of the chaos of their life, to move from the chaos of their subconscious to the wisdom of the state of consciousness.

This journey is illustrated through 7 scenes, which can be discovered here and are described as follows:

• Chaos: Where an individual is overwhelmed by mental and physical structures against which they are measured. It is a world they must understand in order to confront it.
• Getting through the ordeal: Structures organize themselves and the individual positions themselves with and in relation to others and with their environment.
• Hide-and-seek: What are we looking for? The individual moves forward and plays a game of avoiding confronting their thoughts. A game of hide-and-seek with life.
• A forest: A dense forest in the middle of which an image of oneself appears.
• Introspection: Using the structure of an Angkorian temple, the individual walks, evaluates the scales of everything around him/her, of what he/she is himself/herself… He/she walks towards peace and purity.
• The gates of freedom: Suddenly, the environment organizes itself and the right path is indicated.
• Wisdom: There, higher up, peace lies at the end of acquired purity.

Biographical Notes

Valérie Goutard (VAL), born in May 1967, spent her childhood and adolescence divided between Europe, France (her country of origin), Africa, and South America. For this visual artist, belonging to the human community takes precedence over affiliation with a specific nation.

For ten years, she enjoyed a professional life in marketing between London, Madrid and Paris when in 2002 she had a decisive encounter with sculpture thanks to a friend who wanted to show her another path, an alternative.

The shock of the revelation is so profound that the passion felt upon contact with the material will never let go. It is then literally a drive towards the material, in a delight of the senses and a physical fusion with it.

A great deal of creative freedom

Self-taught and instinctive, she learned on her own. Far from being perceived as a lack of academic or technical training, this gave her great freedom to create. As if knowledge could be a hindrance, a kind of weight that could impede her.

Knowledge can indeed prove to be castrating, stifling if one does not dare to distance oneself from it in order to be able to reinject it into creation.

This extremely powerful feeling she experienced the first times she worked with the material, and the desire to prolong the pleasure of bringing forms forth from nothingness, led her to gradually abandon all the ties that constrained her. VAL was enamored with freedom; she severed, one by one, her material, emotional, and cultural attachments that prevented her from fully living out her desire to create.

Expatriation to Asia

In 2004, she left France to live in Bangkok and set up her new sculpture studio in the stimulating environment of this vibrant Asian metropolis where everything seemed possible. There she met her second husband, who became her agent in 2007. In her own words, it was the great freedom offered by Asia, the experience of living abroad, and meeting her soulmate that gave her the wings to become the renowned sculptor she has become in such a short time, seeing her work and talent so appreciated and truly loved by thousands of art and sculpture enthusiasts and collectors.

Beginning in April 2004, when she held her first exhibition in Bangkok, VAL's work was exhibited permanently in galleries in Bangkok throughout 2005, then at the Wellington Gallery in Hong Kong in 2006, the RedSea Gallery in Singapore and the Galerie François Giraudeau in France in 2008, and subsequently, from 2009, in China and Taiwan with the Philippe Staib Gallery. For the next eight years, until VAL's tragic passing in October 2016, numerous other solo exhibitions of her sculptures followed, along with her participation in many important contemporary art fairs throughout Asia, in the aforementioned countries as well as in Korea, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Australia, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Shortly before her death, her works also began to be exhibited in the United States by the Simard-Bilodeau Gallery.

The public reveal

It was after two solo exhibitions in 2009 and 2010 at the Wellington Gallery and another entitled Theater of Life at the RedSea Gallery, also in 2010, that VAL's international reputation as a sculptor took off with her highly acclaimed participation in the Shanghai Art Fair 2010 and as part of the Jing'An International Sculpture Park Project, with the presentation of her first monumental sculpture entitled Urban Life . In the years following this critically acclaimed performance, she went on to hold numerous exhibitions and public installations, creating sculptures that are the very signature of her creative and sculptural vision, including pieces that can be considered the masterpieces of her artistic life, such as Conversation in the Park II and Newborn Child II (2010), Fantastic City and Tango II (2011), Inle Balance III and Eternal Pillars (2012), Inequilibrium and Waiting III (2014), Flying Lovers II and Attraction II (2015).

This period was punctuated by key moments in her career, including the installation of Finding Soulmate II at the Times Square Building in Hong Kong (2011), followed by three large sculptures, including Inle Balance II , at the Sofitel Sukhumvit in Bangkok and a solo exhibition at the Art & Arch Museum in Taiwan (2012), and then the public installation of Waiting III at the New Square Tower in Taipei in 2014. In 2015, VAL won the art category of the French Abroad Trophy, which was presented to her at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris; she also installed Inéquilibre at the Skysuite Tower in Singapore and concluded this particularly productive year with the exhibition Anatomy of a Creative Path at the Franco-Chinese Yish8 Foundation in Beijing.

With the master glassmakers of Murano

Upon settling in Thailand, VAL worked exclusively with bronze, a medium for works that have resonated throughout history, like a torch being passed on to the eternal question of the meaning of life. From mid-2015, however, she discovered the ancestral art of glassmaking with the master glassmakers of Murano. The idea that in these works the voids are just as important as the solid bronze parts is essential for VAL. She expressed it by speaking of a visual rhythm. Glass became her means of giving materiality to these voids, imbuing them with a sense of the sacred through the trompe-l'œil effects it naturally creates. "With glass, reality is not what it seems," she wrote about this. From this apprenticeship, she created Tenth Eonian Initiative from 2015 to 2016, this marvelous collection of sculptures made of glass, bronze, and light. At the same time, she also began sculpting From Chaos to Wisdom for a Taiwanese collector, which is the most spectacular work she has ever created, measuring 36m in length and nearly 5m in height.

2016 was a pivotal year for VAL. The China Academy of Art in Beijing (CAFA) paid her a rare tribute for a Western artist by organizing a retrospective exhibition of her work, and its museum even acquired * Self-Portrait* and *Eternal Pillars* for its permanent collection. She and her husband then achieved the remarkable feat of installing *Ocean Utopia* on the seabed off Koh Tao in Thailand. This sculptural ensemble comprises three monumental pieces in bronze and marine concrete, designed to reintroduce lost coral reefs, which also serve as the third medium in the work. Finally, she completed * From Chaos to Wisdom* and began the bronze casting. This final piece was not installed until 2017 in the hills above Taichung, Taiwan, a few months after her tragic death in Thailand in October 2016.

Inner Happiness Syndrome

Several important post-mortem installations were carried out with VAL's sculptures including Fantastic City II at Benjasiri Park in Bangkok in February 2017 (donated to the city while VAL was still alive), a private sculpture park in Jouy-en-Josas (France) in May 2018 with six of his works including The Extinct II and Attraction II and finally the acquisition of another edition of Attraction II by the Alliance Française of Bangkok in October 2019.

This biography would not be entirely complete without mentioning Val's personality. She was a radiant being, her face constantly emanating a luminous smile, imbued with profound humanism and kindness. Val suffered from the "inner happiness syndrome" that is so clearly evident in her work.