STATEMENT OF WORK

Renée Valenti is a Philadelphia-based artist whose practice focuses on painting, and includes photography and writing. Her oil and acrylic abstract paintings use colorful saturated pallets and draw from questions around desire, societal norms, and folklore. Her work is heavily influenced by cinema and low culture. Valenti’s work is also inspired by the genres of figure painting and early abstraction; as well as fantastical and outlandish sets and films from artists like John Waters, David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, and sets and performances from opera and drag.

In her recent series, biomorphic shapes emerge in highly saturated color devoid of their original narratives. Making them, she thinks about alien figures, body parts, and fringe characters happily living outside societal norms. They fill with colors like bright Cadmium Orange, Naphthol Red, and Quinacridone Opera (a pink that has the subtlety of a Liberace pantsuit). Their sizes range from around 14 x 20 to 54 x 60 inches. Her process includes pinning the canvas directly to the wall while working. She sometimes deconstructs the paintings by scraping or sanding down areas. Collage elements are sometimes added and surfaces are built up using cold wax medium, cut-up sections of paintings from previous canvases, and paper. The small and medium-sized canvases are completed once they are by nailed to wood panels, turning them into objects. The larger paintings remain unstretched.