Valérie Sonnier is a French artist born in 1967 who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1993. She has been a professor of drawing and morphology at the same institution since 2003. Sonnier's works explore the concepts of presence and absence, with nostalgic architectures that are crossed by apparitions. She expresses each project through three mediums: film, photography, and drawing. Sonnier is particularly interested in the architecture of the places she portrays with a jeweler's precision. This decor, which is the theater of spirits and lives that she tries to capture and immortalize, is drawn in graphite, colored pencil, and wax on old school notebooks or account books, filmed with a super 8 camera, and photographed in analog or in color, ghostly traces that constantly transpose us into a past space-time, as if crystallized.
One of her most intimate series is called "Rue Boileau" (2010), where the artist returns to the paths of her childhood in the alleys of her grandmother's house garden, which has since disappeared. In the winter, she immortalizes this place, overrun by nature and frozen for the last time.
More recently, invited to exhibit her work at the Château de Montrésor (2020), which was bought by a wealthy Polish family in 1849, by curator Anne-Laure Chamboissier, Valérie Sonnier strives to capture the presence of this family, whose genealogy was marked by its committed women. The framing of her drawings places us both as indiscreet observers and as ghosts haunted by the memories of this place steeped in history.
In the fall of 2022, a solo exhibition entitled "Tout dit dans l'infini quelque chose à quelqu'un" was dedicated to her at the Maison de Victor Hugo (Paris), where she exhibited her latest series evoking the writer's relationship with the beyond, built around Hauteville House, Victor Hugo's house in Guernsey.
Her work is currently being presented in the group exhibition "Rose is a rose is a rose" at the Mac Val until May 14, 2023, as well as at the Cabinet des dessins et arts graphiques des Beaux-Arts de Paris as part of the exhibition "Les professeurs gribouillent aussi…" until April 21, 2023.
A solo exhibition entitled "Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus" is currently dedicated to her until April 22, 2023.
