Antony Valerian: Between Mexico City and Berlin

Antony Valerian spent seven months in Mexico City and just returned when I met him in Berlin Schöneberg. His second solo show “Help yourself to pretzels” at König Galerie marked the end of his time in the metropolis – until he returns in autumn. After studying at the Kunsthochschule in Vienna, Valerian found his home in Berlin, although it’s not the first time he skipped the cold and rainy winter in the German capital. There’s not much to unpack for now at his backyard studio. A few canvases from several months ago have been stored between old cars and storage from friends. The painter tells me what a new start looks like for him, how the experiences of the past few months influence him in what he puts on canvas, and in which direction the Mexican art scene is moving.

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You spent the winter in Mexico, and now you’ve been back in Berlin for two weeks. How was the return?

Although I sublet my studio while I was away, I stored my paintings here. Getting them out again is always a tricky point when you’ve been away for longer than a few days or a couple of weeks. You find yourself facing half-finished works, some of which you may have already abandoned.

 

It sounds like you’re confronting an older version of yourself in these pieces.

Absolutely. But sometimes it’s also down to technical issues that I end up repainting works. I even have a piece here that’s three years old, which was hanging at my brother’s place for a while. I’ve brought it back now because it needs to be done differently. And I have to say, it’s going better now than it did three years ago.

 

So the break was helpful in this case.

Yes, and also because I spent a lot of time in Mexico looking at a lot of Madonna statues.

 

You went to Mexico last autumn. Did you bring much luggage with you?

No, hardly any. I wanted to go with as little baggage as possible. It wasn’t just about escaping the winter in Berlin, but also about seeing, hearing, and experiencing new things.

Did that work out?

Definitely. It takes a moment to really settle in, of course. Mexico City has nearly nine million inhabitants, and everything is different there.

 

What specifically led you to Mexico?

I feel like in Western metropolises, it hardly matters whether you visit a gallery in Paris or London — you see the same themes. It’s different in Mexico because the art scene has only recently caught the attention of Western galleries. There’s an ancient culture that people there draw from, which still plays a significant role today. At the same time, Mexico City is a growing international metropolis. A lot is happening, and I think people there aren’t quite sure yet in which direction they want to steer it, but everyone is so curious. I believe that curiosity is what sets it apart from saturated cities like New York or L.A. And they have the best tacos (laughs).

 

Did you have much contact with other artists?

The size of the city makes it hard to meet people directly. I lived in the state of Oaxaca for a month and a half, where I had more contact. I worked with a small family-run weaving business. We wove fabrics together, which I later incorporated into my painting experiments.

 

You focus solely on painting. Did Mexico tempt you to consider working in sculpture?

That’s out of the question. No, it just doesn’t interest me (laughs). What’s interesting in Mexico is that people have a great sensitivity to material surfaces. They work a lot with textiles and are less interested in perfectly smooth, lacquered metalwork, like something by Jeff Koons, for example. Some specific textiles and woods are widely used, and even in painting, with oil on canvas, artists there are interested in the surface.

Did the environment influence you?

Not just while I was there, but even afterward. You learn so much, gain new impressions, and develop into who you are the next day. The environment has a big impact on that. The colors and the way people handle things, like what it’s like to live at two and a half thousand meters next to an active volcano.

 

And how is it being back now?

A bit sobering. You look forward to many things, and when you’re back, you realize it’s mostly the people you missed. But being back in the studio and working quietly here is enjoyable. I also have some time before the next exhibition, which was different in Mexico.

 

Are those two different approaches for you — working under time pressure and without?

I definitely work differently under time pressure than when I know I have a few weeks or even months. Right now, I can do a bit of what I want. It feels very different, but what comes out of it is usually the same. I really enjoy the variety, just as I enjoy re-evaluating half-finished works that I left behind seven months ago.

 

Do you work with a plan?

I never really know beforehand what my next ten paintings will be. Now that I’m back in the studio, I’ve ordered some canvases, so the size is set, and I have ideas for what I want to do with them. But whether that’s what it’ll end up being or something completely different will only be decided along the way. Most of the time, I discard things anyway.

When you think about the moment those ten canvases arrive, how does that make you feel?

That depends on how confident I am with the idea at the time. I actually enjoy the final ten or twenty percent of a painting the most when the whole framework is in place, and you’re more about playfully adding some glitter or working out specific details. That will eventually happen with the new blank canvases as well. Sometimes I don’t need to know where it’s heading or even know what it is in the end. The mystery is more important to me than the truth.

 

How did you approach the exhibition in Mexico City?

On the one hand, it was about the interplay between figuration and abstraction and what it takes to create a third dimension on an essentially two-dimensional canvas. There were small paintings with a small lying, sleeping figure, and the entire figure was actually just an outline of a blanket, depicted with a few lighter and darker shades of color. In the end, a little head peeked out from under the blanket. Even with the larger paintings, it was about playing with foreground and background and what it takes to create depth without working with specific angles of a room. The feeling was more technical, not so narrative. There are also works on taco paper. It absorbs well, and you can actually paint quite well with oil paint on it.

 

Would you say your former professor Daniel Richter influenced you?

That’s someone I studied with for five years, so of course he influenced me, even if I didn’t see him every day. In the end, his influence was as much or as little as that of the artists I’ve studied but never met in my life, like Marlene Dumas, for example. Daniel probably influenced me more in my approach to painting. That’s what we ended up talking about a lot; it was more like a philosophy course on painting rather than about the act of painting itself, the process of getting paint onto the canvas. He lives just around the corner and also has his studio here.

 

Do you sometimes run into each other on the street?

Yes, but rarely. I think he’s as reluctant to leave his studio as I am.