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An article about Valery Valius from the catalog of the exhibition in Fürstenfeldbruck "Nonconformism - Russian art from the collection Breitscheidel."

Authors: Verena Beaucamp M.A., Dr. Lusine Breitscheidel, Dr. Elena Korowin, Angelika Mundorff M.A.
Editors: Verena Beaucamp M.A., Dr. Barbara Kink, Angelika Mundorff M.A.
2020
ISBN: 978-3-9821516-0-1

Valery Valius

Moscow

Born in 1939 in Moscow

Painter, photographer, computer graphic

Valery Valius was born in Moscow in 1939 in the family of unofficial artist Pyotr Valius and writer Anna Valtseva. ¹ A father who, after 35 years, finally abandoned the profession of engineer and the related material support for the unstable life of an unofficial artist, tried early to interest his son in painting. However, Valery initially decided to study natural sciences at Moscow University and received a Ph.D. in geophysics. Only after the death of his father in 1971 and a careful study of his work, among other activities, including programming, Valius began to relate to painting not just as a spectator. He participated in organizing a private exhibition and art meetings in a small Moscow basement studio, which his father received shortly before his death. Valius emigrated to Germany in 1977 in order to avoid the rigid framework and ideological restrictions of the totalitarian regime. Since 1986 he lived and worked in Munich as a freelance artist. He exhibited his works and his father’s works in an unconventional way - in a park, on trees, in the snow, on sidewalks near traffic or in cellars, apartments and other places, generally not intended for the exhibition of paintings. Since his father’s paintings, largely ignored by official cultural institutions, were at risk of confiscation or destruction, Valius took them with him to the West to be able to present them to the public. After Gorbachev’s reforms introduced freedom of speech and opened the country to the West in the late 1980s, Valius returned to Moscow in 1991 with his father’s paintings. He still organizes numerous exhibitions and is actively engaged in computer graphics and video art for several years.

Valius is a member of the Bavarian Professional Union of Artists Landesverband Bayern e.V. (BBK) and the Moscow Art Fund. His works are in galleries and private collections in Russia, Germany, USA, Canada, Israel, England, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, South Korea and Iran. Since 1987, he has been presenting his paintings at numerous Russian and international solo and group exhibitions, and since 2009 he has been participating in various exhibitions of computer graphics.

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From the very beginning, Valius was not interested in the outwardly visible world, but primarily in the spiritual ideas behind real matter. The analytical approach of the physicist decisively shaped his first work. He began to photograph at high magnification the ghostly phenomena caused by reflections of light on objects, and then translate them into figurative painting.

The artist is convinced that paintings are sometimes better suited for conveying messages than text. “Pictures are easier to understand than words; it takes less time to examine a picture than reading a text.” Artists of the Soviet regime perfectly understood how strongly symbolic images affect people and how convincingly political messages can be transmitted through art. “Art, and painting in particular, has quite a few different functions. For example, in societies with difficult political regimes, one of the functions of art is to demonstrate to people that everything is in order, there is no reason to worry and be sad. In the course are beautiful landscapes, plentiful still lifes, happy families, joyful work, grandiose achievements, portraits of activists. To explain to the Germans what the term socialist realism means is very simple: "This is what was in your art under Hitler.” ² Like some other non-conformist artists, such as Eric Bulatov (born 1932), Valius works with common symbols of Marxism-Leninism but uses them with irony. So “Our locomotive” with a portrait similar to Lenin refers to the popular communist battle song, "Our steam train fly forward, there is a stop in the commune. We have no other way ...} ”, on the other hand, the shield of the snow pusher also hints at the purges that the authorities arranged in the country. The painting also evokes associations with an open-air exhibition in Moscow, which was brutally destroyed by bulldozers in 1974. In Valius’s picture, pillars firmly driven between the sleepers prevent the locomotive from continuing to move. Sickle and hammer - in Soviet propaganda a symbol of the cohesion of workers and peasants - is reinterpreted by a figure tired of propaganda, holding a sickle at the throat.

Munich, 1987

“Examining a picture takes less time than reading a book; in painting there is no translation into alphabetic characters, completely unlike what they mean. The works of V. Valius, as a rule, are not about the author, but about other people and for other people - for the audience.”

Our locomotive, 2003

“Monuments to the Unknown Convict” 1996

In most cases, the mysterious symbolic paintings of Valius are not immediately understood. Surrealistic compositions, fantastic figures and amphibian-like hybrid creatures with human features resemble dreams or illustrations of thoughts about what happened. It is not surprising that Valius calls Edward Munch (1863-1944) one of his favorite artists, who intensively worked on his dreams and developed from them his own symbolism. Valius' works also resemble the surreal works of Max Ernst (1891-1972). Valius formulates his thoughts and feelings about life with the help of a concentrated symbolic language of painting and expressive color.

Omitting distracting forms, he focuses on several motives that are simplified and alienated to become metaphors. In the works of Valius, one can find pictures with social problems, such as violations of human rights, abuse of power, environmental disasters, as well as sensual, interpersonal, and religious topics. Valius always focuses on people with all their emotional aspects. He turns to the associative emotional world of the viewer, and invites everyone to find the meaning of the picture in their own way.

The painting “Monuments to the Unknown Convict” represents a single accusation formulated from several associative elements: based on an enlarged photograph of a crushed cigarette butt, Valius depicts a huge human skull next to a part of the Kremlin wall. In the background there is an option reminiscent of the monument to the victims of the Treblinka death camp by Vadim Sidur³ and the memorial of sculptor Mikhail Shemyakin dedicated to the memory of victims of political repressions.⁴ Another version of the “monument” looks like a fenced plant or even a city that prisoners often built. In the oppressive picture “Magnifier glass”, Valius very cruelly condemns sexual mores in places of detention.

Valius often works with a spatula, creating wide lines and pasty paint application. A few years ago, a game with images with clear shapes and vibrant colors led him to computer graphics, with which he redid his own works, as well as old drawings of his father.

1 Detailed biography on the homepage http://vpvalius.ru (accessed October 28, 2019)

2 Ibid. Valery Valius interview on the home page

3 The sculpture of the Russian sculptor Vadim Abramovich Sidur (1924-1986) in 1966 was installed in 1979 in a local courtyard in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

4 The "Great Sphinx" by Mikhail Shemyakin (born 1943) was installed in 1995 in St. Petersburg on the Neva Embankment opposite the prison “Kresty”.