ARTENSION
A gallery is not just another store | Valérie EYMERIC by Laurence D’IST.
Located in the heart of Lyon, the gallery named after its founder is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Before starting her own business, Valérie Eymeric only knew the art world from the point of view of the collector she has always been. It’s a passion she shares with her husband, except that now they collect the gallery’s own artists.
It’s important to support them and to be sincere,” she says, ”even with the people we receive at home. It’s a gentler form of communication that pays off over time”. Trained as a business lawyer, mother of 3 children whom she raises, and an amateur painter, Valérie decided in her fifties to find a new way of fulfilling her life. “Initially, I thought I’d reconcile my two passions, but it’s impossible to be a gallery owner with a paintbrush. I don’t paint anymore, and I have no regrets! She throws herself, she says, “wholeheartedly into the business”, with a personal rule of justice: “pay the artists” as soon as she has the funds. Her line is “my taste. Color, for those who observe my choices,” she adds, ”and my good relationship with the artists.
A harmonious chromatic range, with varying degrees of abstraction: gaseous in Frédéric Galliano, veiled in Adrien Jutard, crystalline in Marc-Antoine Decavèle. The fluidity of the pictorial layer slips into figurative atmospheres, as with Francky Criquet and photographer Andréa Vamos. In the end, they all work on the materiality of landscapes that are nothing but flux. Whether seen from the sky in Jérémie Lenoir’s shots, or through the dance of light and shadow in Jo Lewis’s painted volutes… Nature is also the common denominator between the humanist work of sculptor Marc Petit, whom the gallery permanently represents, and the floral overabundance of painter Nurhidayat’s pop compositions. Upstairs, the gallery presents small-format exhibitions at less than 1,000 euros, based on the cabinet de curiosités principle and often proposed by guest curators.
Curious about people and eager to learn, she takes an interest in other cultural structures as secretary of Lyon’s Adele network. This association brings together art centers, whose “economy is radically different from that of a gallery”, she confirms. While they are not obliged to achieve results through sales, she shares their pugnacity in seeking funding and ideas to defend and showcase creative work. She also organizes a quarterly lunch with local colleagues “to share our joys and sorrows”, she laughs. Right from the start, she took part in the “Osons les galeries” event organized by the Comité professionnel des galeries d’art. And after taking part in the Art Paris fair 4 times, she now prefers regional fairs such as Art Paper Lyon and the new Grenoble Art Up. A good contact with a Swiss gallery, and they decide to exchange one artist each, exhibiting the Frenchman in Porrentruy and the Swissman in Lyon. Proof that it’s the gallerist’s personality that makes the gallery. When he’s absent, his assistant reports that people are surprised: “Isn’t Madame Eymeric here?
