French artist Valerie Sury is a painter, printer, animator, and sculptuor. Her paintings and papier mâché dolls carry the intensity linked with Art Brut through complex compositions and meticulous application of textures and colors. Working in papier mâché lets Valerie create her forms quickly taking on quirky figurative shapes reminiscent of Niki de St. Phalle or Louise Bourgeois. Her acrylic paintings sometimes borrow the idea of ex-voto paintings using contemporary pop iconography taken for the most part from American culture. It is tempting to describe Sury’s art books as artsy and edgy comics, but that description doesn’t tell the whole story. CLICK HERE to see one of Sury’s animations.

Lakeside Residence is simply a telling of her experiences and impressions while in residency at Lakeside Studios in Michigan. Because she uses pop iconography and challenging, at times almost childish, visuals as well as a mix of French and English views, Sury gives us a unique perspective on the American experience. Lakeside Residence unfolds to reveal an abstract landscape, accentuated with the words sun, sea, and sky. Over this landscape there is the outline of a plane and on the wings of the plane are the words, "We are in the sky." From there, the front page of the book, once removed from the outer cover, begins with a larger picture of the plane and the words "We are in the plane." From this point on, the narrative of the piece is only suggested loosely.

In her characteristic style, Sury gives us her take on life in America. Love the King opens with a mocking reproduction of a Passport in light purple. The first several pages depict, in colorful and chaotic visuals and a mix of French and English, Sury's travel experience on her way to America from France. Next we are given Sury's odd and rakish Chicago which, while similar to the Chicago she presents in Lakeside Residence, seems to be a subtler and more textured atmosphere. The saga continues with sketches depicting a cross country trip, from Chicago to San Francisco, on a Greyhound bus. Rich visual metaphor defines Sury's characterizations throughout; two oblong heads have bulbous hands clamped to their mouths next to the word "barbeque," a side view of the bus reveals sheep, cattle and demons where you would normally see passengers, a man with a long thin head cries inky black tears while reading Dune. Intense, challenging work.

In Love The King and Lakeside Residence, Sury uses her wild visual sense to create narratives of her travels in the U.S. In Zoobizarre the form of her visual style takes center stage and holds us with the purity of her form. Words still appear, and at times they are significant to the emotion she lends to her visual scenes, but the words here are not used to define the course of the visual narrative as much as they accentuate the visuals themselves. Words flow seamlessly from the wall of a nightclub to the interior of a man's head. Next to the words, "I think I drank too much-adult," neon yellow police strike aggressive poses in a loose abstract street scene.

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