Valeska Soares
Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1957
“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language”
From a lover Discourse, Roland Barthes
In Valeska Soares universe, objects are a source of poetry and imagination, capable of accumulating life and keeping secrets. Soares was born in 1957 in Belo Horizonte, in the Brazilian state of Mina Gerais. At a very young age, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she lives and works to this day. Her studies in architecture and her interest in literature are perceived in her works of conceptual and minimalist aesthetics—works that play with the perception of time, invoke sensations and move instincts. Desire and excess merge in an entropy that shows the meditated intention of offering an experience.
The sensibility of these works is intimately linked to their surroundings, brought about by context or the imprint of the audience; they are often resignified from one space to another and through time. The materials Soares uses can range from perfume bottles and wine glasses to chairs, stairs and even clocks, but books are the protagonists of much of her work. These objects, which the artist finds and collects, are strategically appropriated to question the viewer, based on their amount, arrangement and newly acquired meaning.
Her colleague and contemporary Vik Muniz mentions: "Through a seemingly inexhaustible range of techniques, themes and strategies, Valeska’s work oscillates between materiality and memory, desire and decay, sensation and intoxication." After living for several decades in the United States, the English language appears to be one of the major protagonists in her works. In Any Moment Now..., Valeska proposes an immersive assemblage made up of three hundred and sixty-five book covers, whose titles refer to time, weather changes and different states of mind: literature from all periods and all genres, grouped into the four seasons of the year, to create a metatextual reflection on time – a library reminiscent of a calendar.
