Valentin Fougeray
Biography
Valentin Fougeray (b. 1989, France) is a visual artist and photographer whose practice explores a visual language where color serves as the primary vocabulary. After an initial training in architecture, he studied photography at Gobelins, Paris.
His early work, such as the series Balance, involved constructing ephemeral installations that explored an ambiguous materiality, blurring the boundary between the tangible and the imagined. Over time, his approach has evolved toward a more abstract language, favoring suggestion over description.
In 2023, he created Chantal, a series dedicated to his maternal grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. This intimate figure became the starting point for a visual meditation on memory, loss, and remembrance. Through compositions of blurred colors and vibrant, almost fleeting flowers, Fougeray seeks to capture what fades away and to evoke its sensitive echo. He aims to spark an emotional resonance in the viewer, planting seeds of personal memories, sometimes buried deep.
Freed from documentary conventions, he conceives photography as a poetic, sculptural, and sensory space. The absence of a fixed subject in his images invites a free and intimate appropriation, where color and form become vehicles of evocation.
Nothing is fixed or certain: each image opens a crack into the imagination, a fragile memory, a fleeting reverie. It is through this openness that the artist chooses to inhabit forgetting. With a sensitive and open approach, Valentin Fougeray questions our ways of being in the world — between perception, memory, and emotion — inviting us into a presence that is intuitive, fluid, and deeply human.
Fougeray’s work has been exhibited in both solo and group shows, including Balance at Espace T2 in Paris and the Rencontres d’Arles. Whether through delicate spatial arrangements or emotionally charged abstractions, he investigates how images carry both structure and sentiment — anchored in materiality yet open to interpretation.
Works
