Valentin Bardo, an artist based in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire
Valentin Bardo, an artist based in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire

Valentin Bardo

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ARTIST, PRODUCER & PERFORMER
My artistic journey began with fronting bands and performing solo on the live music circuit. As a seventeen-year-old art student, my interest in bringing visual drama to the stage intensified through the study of graphics and audiovisual communication, but when an invitation came along to join the gothic circus Laughter In The Garden, I didn’t hesitate to swap college for a hands-on apprenticeship in art and life. Travelling and working alongside an ever-evolving team of artists and performers, I was free to explore and develop my creative vocabulary through music, movement, visuals, lighting and sound. Between theatrical excursions, I earned extra money painting ceramic collectables at the John Hines Studio and printing fabrics for punk fashion outlet Arsenic & Old Lace. A derelict warehouse on the banks of the river Gwenfro served as my home, and with the assistance of a small team of artisans, I was able to transform the space. The result was a hub of artistic endeavour and my first commercial studio, Paint It Red.

1988 was hailed in popular culture as the ‘Second Summer Of Love’ and as a twenty-one-year old, I was setting my sights further afield. Although unsure about what direction I wanted to head, London’s club and art scene was booming so I followed it there. After a year working as a costumier with the BBC and absorbing metropolitan influences, I reinvented a smarter self and landed internships in media and events styling in the offices of two of the capital’s brightest PR gurus, Liz Bolton and Lynne Franks. For a young creative with fresh ideas, my training offered a wealth of opportunity to work alongside and learn from high-calibre designers and directors. Over the next few years, a tide of optimistic enterprise drove an explosion in creative practice across the capital and I stepped out as a versatile freelancer, working on a huge variety of projects and becoming willingly consumed by the hedonistic beau monde of the indie music, fashion and press industries. But circuses come and go, and approaching twenty-seven years of age I was ready for a new, and more meaningful, challenge.

The seeds of the next great change were planted by rebellious socialite artist Luciana Martinez de la Rosa, who encouraged me to quit commercial arts and follow my vocation “to become an artist”. For a couple of years I lay low, travelling, experimenting, accumulating influences, and absorbing western arts and literature in my search for guides. During that time, I developed an affinity with Expressionism and in particular the use of art to transmit personal experience. It was upon this basis that my work was to evolve. When the time came to see how in practice this would manifest, I turned to where art began: exploring form through line, clay, chemistry and fire. At Kensington & Chelsea College sculpture emerged as the dominant outlet, and in discovering the ancient art of Raku firing, I joined with a team of experimental ceramicists based at the Wornington Institute to develop a variation on its techniques. Ultimately, however, the medium didn’t serve my expressive purpose and the search continued.

I’d been considering painting for some time, and in short succession, some key players strongly influenced my move towards it. The first was Joe Machine, who within a few years would become one of the founders of the ‘Remodernist’ (Stuckist) collective. Over the course of one particular drunken conversation, his divine suggestion that painters can “bleed, scream and set the world on fire without fucking up the carpets and upsetting the neighbours” offered a visceral consideration that was difficult to ignore. The second was Bella Matveeva, one of the principals of the Russian ‘New Academy’ movement, whose classic European aesthetics and post-modern sensuality I profoundly connected with. At a party in her studio in St.Petersburg in 1995, I suddenly became certain that at my core lay the soul of a painter, and on my return to London the crossover to oil as my primary medium was finally cemented. A Kensington apartment served as the first of a string of residential studios and for two years I channelled my introspection, producing in-situ a collection of work to hang on its walls. In 1997, on my thirtieth birthday, I opened the doors on my debut exhibition, and so began a series of one-man shows that were to become the core focus of my activity for the next two decades.

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