Valentin Carron
Learning from Martigny
Collection
Monographs & Artists’ Books
Edited by
Lionel Bovier
Author(s)
Nicolas Pages
Edition
English
January 2010
ISBN: 978-3-03764-095-1
Softcover, 160 x 220 mm
128 pages
Images 80 color
CHF 48 / EUR 32 / £ 23 / US 45
Print pdf
Artist's book

In "Learning from Las Vegas" (1977), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, as a call to reinvigorate architectural design with symbolic content, advocated the study of the commercial strip and in particular, the role that signs play in conveying meaning and providing order to the landscape. In "Learning from Martigny," Valentin Carron (*1975, lives and works in Martigny, Switzerland), offers a photo-documentation of his surroundings—the sources for some of his works—intertwined with images of his sculptures or paintings. If Carron's sculptures mark a renewal of appropriation through the re-employment of vernacular forms that are not part of the dominant culture, the artist develops a project confusing genres. Neither authentic nor kitsch, neither readymade nor really craft, his objects play with ambiguity (fake wood, fake concrete, fake bronze, etc.) and with an iconography of power and authority (public sculptures or commemorative monuments, traditional forms, etc.). Designed by the studio Gavillet & Rust/Eigenheer, this artist's book includes a new contribution by the writer Nicolas Pages.

Published in collaboration with La Conservera, Murcia.
Of related interest
VALENTIN CARRON at Praz-Delavallade in Paris