Emilie Duval (CV)

Emilie Duval is a French/American multi-disciplinary visual artist. Her work is defined by research and observation to acknowledge the functionality of our societies. She focuses her interest on a wide range of contemporary matters. She translates them into an artistic metaphoric vision to extract the very sense of our societies' structural balance. She aims to lead people to a new observation of their surroundings by triggering a questioning reflection. Her work is to transform the words into a pictorial representation of societal's future tremors by developing intellectual and visual connections with people.

She was exhibited at the Holocaust Museum in Houston in 2016. She was previously featured in New American Paintings (West Issue, #72). In 2017 Duval’s work was shown at Aqua Art Basel, Miami, and in a solo show "Order From Chaos" at the Cindy Lisica Gallery in Montrose. In 2019, she had solo shows at the Heidi Vaughan Fine Art Gallery in Houston, the FWCAC in Fort Worth, and made an art talk about my creative process in visual art at Rice University. In 2021, she had a solo show in Houston at HVFA, “The Order of the Simulation” and in 2022, she had a solo in Canada at Patrick Mikhail, “Computational Dust of Existence.”

Artist Statement

Emilie Duval works on theoretical concepts defined by research and observation to acknowledge the functionality of our societies and their future. To share her vision, she creates a philosophical architecture of her reasoning that she transposes into paintings, videos, and installations.

She works with series to explore concepts regarding the human entities’ value on the digital scale. She studied the concept of “Heterotopias,” developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in the other digital spaces. She demonstrates how human entities have a reflective self in the dematerialized world to envision the future value of their consciousness with the expansion of digitized new territories.

In the series, “Computational Dust of Existence,” her last body of works, she explores the duality between the biological and the digital state. The forest landscapes are merging with a computerized scenery that deploys a digital grid in an alternate world where the simulation intermixes with reality. Each painting symbolizes a digital metamorphosis to sequence the existence of singular entities with a computerized perspective. The assemblage of paint, drawings, and collages creates a multidimensional representation of an intricate future made of digital networks where fiction and reality become indissociable.

She aims to raise the question of social reality and how the digitized convergence of thinking creates a new socio-political order. The fact that she focuses on the increased value of people by their digital perception poses the question of the physical finitude and its relevance. The magnificent colors and perspectives will immerse you into her intricate world of a digital self reflexion that goes beyond any known mental architecture. Each painting reveals the cover of a chapter of structural wonders and invites you to create your future.