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.
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:
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)