Patrice Valota

From the very beginning, Valota has used a rather unusual medium: wax. Let us listen to him: "Wax never stops surprising me. It's like a book I open and where I can feel under the page I see the next page and the one afterwards. I have the feeling I paint on the edge. Wax offers all its delicacy and transparency to the touch of the flame of my blowtorch. It absorbs colours, transcends them and guides me in my search for other hues. Wax is alive, sensual. Wax is light, it is at the heart of my story." With Valota, roughness contrasts with sensuality; the play of light with materials and colours; heat, which is inherent to fire, with cooling, which comes from simplicity and thus from a certain rigour. Valota was, it seems, aware from the start of his unique and very autonomous nature, when he expressed his desire to enter the world of art as if he was breaking in.
(José Alvarez, Editions du Regard)