Painting has returned at the heart of the conversation. At Anne & Valentin, we like nothing as much as connecting the dots, on a daily basis, weaving a link between the radicality of a Henry Taylor and that of Alice Neel, the breathtaking portraitist we discovered in Arles… Radicality hit us again, during our creative process, when Childish Gambino released his This is America video. But also, well, with Massive Attack, Philip Glass, Brian Eno. These are the artists who have been spinning on the studio’s turntable of late. In preparation for this collection, a very beautiful monograph of the architect Carlos Scarpa, by Japanese publisher TOTO, also circulated, passing from hand to hand. So did Color and Meaning, Art, Science and Symbolism, by historian John Cage, and Paul Klee’s Diary.
Stripped down, streamlined, simplified, returning to the sign: this new collection refers less to the retro, which proved a major playground in the past. On the contrary, our eyes and our thoughts turned towards the future, to the possibilities it offers to master shapes, explore clean lines and offer new directions with laser technologies, for example.
And yet, it was while rediscovering Egyptian art and the contemporaneity of art from Antiquity, in the Louvre, that we experienced our greatest surprises. The refinement of the object, already, the relief, the sign, the engraving, the quality brought to things, the know-how and craftsmanship that have traversed time, are all elements that have inhabited us since.

We set out to dare. Dare to touch. Dare to embark upon paths to the future. We thrive to connect with the future, engraving the computer tablets of the present like scribes of sorts.