The sculpture of Val featured in this exhibition is the 1/5th scale version of his masterpiece "From Chaos to Wisdom" that Val sculpted before taking on the challenge of enlarging this monumental sculpture. This work of art is made of bronze and measures 36 meters long.

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 emerge from 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 to discover here and described as below:

• Chaos: Where an individual is overwhelmed by mental and physical structures against which they are measured. It is a world that he must understand in order to face it.
• Getting through the ordeal: The structures are organized and the individual positions himself with and in relation to others and to his environment.
• Hide and seek: What are we looking for? The individual moves forward and plays at not confronting his thoughts. Hide and seek game 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, of what he himself is... He/she walks towards peace and purity.
• The doors to freedom: Suddenly, the environment is organized and the right path is indicated.
• Wisdom: There, higher up, peace is at the end of acquired purity.

Biographical landmarks

Valérie Goutard (Val) born in May 1967 lived a childhood and adolescence shared between Europe, France where she is from, Africa and South America. Belonging to the community of men takes precedence in this visual artist and not the reference to a specific nation.

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

The shock of the revelation is such that the passion experienced in contact with matter will never let go. It is then literally the momentum towards matter, in a delight of the senses and a physical fusion with it.

Great freedom to create

Self-taught, instinctive, she learns alone. Far from being felt as an academic and technical lack, it gave her great freedom to create. As if knowledge could be a brake, a kind of weight that could hinder it.

Knowledge can indeed turn out to be castrating, stifling if one does not dare to put it at a distance in order to be able to reinject it into creation.

This extremely strong impression felt the first time by modeling the material, and the desire to prolong the pleasure of making forms, emerge from nothingness, pushes her to gradually abandon all the links that constrain her. Val is in love with freedom, she cuts one by one her material, sentimental or cultural attachments which prevent her from fully living her desire to create.

Expatriation in Asia

In 2004, she left France to come and live in Bangkok and set up her new sculptor's studio in this stimulating environment that is this bubbling Asian megalopolis where everything seems possible to her. There she met her second husband who became her agent from 2007. It was, in her own words, the great freedom offered by Asia, expatriation and her meeting with her soul mate that gave her wings large enough to become the recognized sculptor she has become in so few years, seeing her work and her talent so appreciated and truly loved by thousands of art and sculpture enthusiasts and collectors.

From April 2004, when she had her first exhibition in Bangkok, Val's work was exhibited permanently in galleries in Bangkok during 2005, then at the Wellington of Hong Kong Gallery in 2006, at the RedSea Gallery in Singapore and at the Galerie François Giraudeau in France in 2008, and then from 2009 in China and Taiwan with the Philippe Staib Gallery. During the next eight years and until the tragic death of Val in October 2016, many other personal exhibitions of her sculptures and her participation in multiple and important contemporary art fairs all over Asia in the above-named countries will follow, but also in Korea, Malaysia, India, Indonesia as well as in Australia and also in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Holland. Shortly before her death, her works also began to be exhibited in the United States by the Simard-Bilodeau Gallery.

Revelation to the public

It was after two personal exhibitions in 2009 and 2010 at the Wellington Gallery and another entitled Theater of life at the RedSea Gallery also in 2010, that VAL saw her international reputation as a sculptor soar during her very notable participation at the Shanghai Art Fair 2010 and as part of the Jing'An International Sculpture Park Project with the presentation of his first monumental sculpture entitled Urban life . During the years that followed this critically acclaimed performance, she held numerous exhibitions and public installations and created sculptures which are the very signature of her creative and sculptural vision and among which pieces that can be considered as the masterpieces -works from his life as an artist such as Conversation au parc II and New born child II (2010), Fantastic city and Tango II (2011), Inle balance III and Eternal pillars (2012), Inquilibre and Waiting III (2014) , Flying lovers II and Attraction II (2015).

This period was punctuated by key moments in his career including the installation of Finding soulmate II at the Time Square Building in Hong Kong (2011), then that of three large sculptures including Inle balance II , at the Sofitel Sukhumvit in Bangkok and a personal exhibition at the Art & Arch Museum in Taiwan (2012), then the public installation of Waiting III at the New Square Tower in Taipei in 2014. In 2015, VAL was the winner of the art section of the Trophée des Français de l'Étranger which was given to her at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, she also installed Inquilibre at the Skysuite Tower in Singapore and will conclude this particularly fertile year with the exhibition Anatomy of a creative path at the Franco-Chinese Yish8 foundation in Beijing.

With the master glassmakers of Murano

As soon as he settled in Thailand, VAL worked exclusively in bronze, a medium of works that have spanned history, like the resumption of a torch on the eternal questioning 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 formulated it by speaking of a visual rhythm. Glass was for her the means of giving materiality to her voids by bringing a sacred element to them through the appearance of the trompe-l'oeil that it naturally generates. “With glass, reality is not what it seems,” she wrote about this. From this learning, 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 to sculpt From Chaos to Wisdom for a Taiwanese collector which is the most spectacular work she has created with a length of 36 m and a height of almost 5 m.

The year 2016 was a sort of peak for VAL. The Chinese Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (CAFA) paid him a rare tribute for a Western artist by organizing a retrospective exhibition of his work and its museum even acquired Self-portrait and Eternal pillars for its permanent collection. She then achieved with her husband the feat of installing Ocean Utopia on the seabed of Koh Tao in Thailand. This sculptural ensemble is made up of three monumental pieces in bronze and marine concrete aimed at the reimplantation of disappeared coral massifs which are the third medium of this work. Finally she finishes From Chaos to Wisdom and begins casting it in bronze. This will only be installed in 2017 on the heights of Taichung (Taiwan) a few months after his tragic death in Thailand in October 2016.

Inner Happiness Syndrome

Several important post-mortem installations were created with VAL sculptures including Fantastic City II at Benjasiri Park in Bangkok in February 2017 (donation to the city during VAL's lifetime), a private sculpture park in Jouy-en-Josas (France) in May 2018 with six of his works including L'éteinte 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 completely complete if it did not evoke the personality of Val. She was a solar being, her face constantly irradiated with a luminous smile, imbued with a deep humanism and kindness. Val suffered from the "inner happiness syndrome" that is so evident in her work.