Text by Rafaël Laffay - 2025

"He who thinks the deepest loves the most alive"...

Valja is one of those artists who does not consider reflecting on the soul of our world other than through all our senses. Against the grain of more than a millennium of a Western tradition that conceives the soul as a cradle of eternity encapsulated in a perishable body, Valja intends to rediscover the primacy of the body as the central vehicle of our emotions, our unconfessed secrets, our inner indentations.

The tools and her imagination are created in context, in the brilliance of a moment that delivers its truth. Day after day, with such a regular, implacable gesture, the idea becomes flesh, the work takes shape. With her, the body presents itself like a kaleidoscope drunk with colors.

Solar, he swoons under the heat of the climate. Wounded, he reveals pain as the antechamber of our human condition. Animal, he digs into the unfathomable enigma of our origins. He always delivers his unbearable truth.

Valja lifts the veil on our whispers, which are hidden within our bodies, erect like blocks. It is this primary flaw that resides in each of us that she sculpts in the stone itself, itself kneaded with its history and its rough edges.

It took the artist experiencing her own deserts, the relentless rolling of the sea, and completing her walk to the summits of steep rocks, for her to connect with her sole obsession: Man. Where art prides itself on representing Beauty by promoting appearances as its only horizon, Valja achieves the audacity to give it thanks through our cracks. So difficult to look at directly...

Like a threat of annihilation, this body speaks to us of the mortal imprint of time, yet in a luminous way. By enameling it with a bearable appearance through the joint quest for the beautiful thing, the artist reconciles beauty and goodness, in an ancient gesture. She addresses the darkest reality to us with the grace of a caress.

To contemplate Valja's works is to confront oneself, in a dizzying dance because it is underground, because the air is as discreet as it is invigorating, it which comes from the depths of experience.

Dwelling between earth and sky, sea and hilltops, the artist desires to reconcile in an artistic stasis all that Man has chosen to dissociate, eager for control over things. In the imperious conquest inaugurated by the division of the world, Valja intends to reunite these false opposites that have impoverished our soul, kneaded by fear.

Very few panegyrics of interiority can be heard in our time. These seem, on the contrary, to be in full disintegration before the supremacy of objects and consumerist ardor, so many realities that ruin Man by making him become a puppet of the all-external without bringing him back to himself, to the deepest, to his infinite mystery. For this is what Valja's works cry out in unison: the insoluble enigma of our subjectivity, willing but immediately afraid to glimpse and understand its origin, in perpetual struggle against a world that reveals its most absurd side.

Yet, far from remaining motionless on these peaks of pain, it is this same original fault which is celebrated, sung by the round of naked bodies.

The sweetness of friendly confession, the erotic explosion of fused bodies, the solar gift of self, the joyful quest for one's essence...

Valja invites us to all this. So, let yourself be guided by her smile, quite a style; she shows you that the passage of time is full of tireless joy.


"Carte blanche to Valja",
EGOLAREVUE, Alexandra Eretzian, 2010
A nomadic artist, Valja has made the world her studio. Her motto? "Be in the midst of everything, of life." Currently exiled in Lanzarote, she is preparing her next exhibition there. This island of fire, water, wind, and light provides her with the physical contact with nature she needs to feel alive. "I have walked on the moon, I am the volcano, and I burn. I am the ocean wave rocked by its ripples. I am the wind that caresses me, and the shivers that run through me tell me of the strength of the elements."
It was her Totem project, "I am the navel of the world," that brought her there two years ago. In search of somewhere else, a virgin and stimulating terrain for her experiments, she was welcomed by an English sculptor, Rita Ling. Her work then consisted of painting on bodies in a completely instinctive way and then making prints from cotton canvases. "Painting navels, without knowing the language or anyone, was an exciting adventure, fantastically rich in exotic encounters. When you paint on skin, on bodies that breathe, surfacing different emotions, it can be very disturbing." This is hardly surprising, as the manifestations and vibrations of the soul are her main source of inspiration. Her ideal? "To represent the intangible." An uncontrollable artist, fiercely attached to her freedom, Valja has always remained off the beaten track. For her, expressing herself means creating her own references. Perpetually inhabited by her creation, she produces works which are the apotheosis of an intense personal journey.
The supports are diverse: stone, wood, bronze or other materials, chosen according to the vagaries of life, encounters and places. Her sculptures depict a body caught in its intimacy [...] Her art also draws on the mythological imagination, it puts into perspective the evolution of our civilization and alerts us to the future of our society. But when we ask her about her own future, she responds with these sibylline words: "the future, for me, began yesterday...".


And also:

Communications manager for the publication and release of the comic book "Le monstre" by Paul Vallée, in Quebec (Canada) in 1995
Manager of the press company Le Transodysséen and publication director of the critical cultural magazine ZWANZE, 8,000 copies in the Rhône-Alpes region 1993-1994
Creation of radio programs and columnist in 1989 and 1994 (Radio Pluriel and Espace)
Work on workers' memory and co-author of the book on Rhodiaceta "Faces of a textile factory in Lyon from 1924 to 1987" in 1992
Creator and leader of socio-cultural associations from 1988 to 1993
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