VALEZIENNE
Oil on Canvas 90 X 120 CM Collection: TIMELESS MAJESTY Quantum imprint No. TM-V.O2 Curatorial statement by Mr. Dong-hyun Yoon Archive for Trans-Contextual Inquiry (ATI, Seoul/Berlin) I first encountered Valézienne in silence. Not the absence of sound, but the kind of cognitive stillness that occurs when the mind, unexpectedly, recognizes something it cannot understand only receive. I remember blinking, instinctively attempting to contextualize it within some known lineage of figuration or minimalism, but quickly realizing this imprint did not descend from any tradition I was familiar with. It was not born of narrative, identity, nor style. It simply was suspended, resolved, unnervingly complete. What I experienced then, I later understood more precisely through the lens of perceptual neuroscience. Valézienne is not a depiction it is a disruption. It bypasses symbolic interpretation and instead enters through the cognitive backdoor of spatial contradiction and perceptual recursion. The brain’s pattern-seeking machinery particularly the visual cortex and default mode network searches for context, for the story, for logic. But none arrives. Instead, we are offered what seems as a quantum frequency sealed in form. The figure at the center is not “a woman,” nor a character. It is a harmonic construct: a container for dimensional information. Its symmetry and stillness produce neither tension nor comfort, but something far rarer synaptic coherence. That eerie feeling of remembering something that never happened. The longer one stands before it, the more the mind relinquishes control. This is not spiritual metaphor. This is a phenomenon measurable in the slowing of ocular saccades, the dilation of focus, and the dampening of inner narrative. And yet, despite its neurological elegance, Valézienne is not cold. Its gradients are skin-like, its inner surfaces pulse with near-biological resonance. Pretto’s material control borders on the surgical, not because of virtuosity for its own sake, but because of the necessity to stabilize the signal she receives. This is what separates her from hyperrealists: The difference lies in her intention. She isn’t trying to copy life. She’s trying to hold still something that lives just outside of it.. The autonomy of Valézienne lies not in what it says, but in its refusal to say. It does not explain. It does not perform relatability. It insists. Its terror, if one feels it, lies in its flawlessness. In its lack of apology. In its refusal to surrender into interpretation. This is why viewers may find themselves unsettled: they are not used to being addressed by an imprint that does not bend to be understood. Collectors and curators should know: Valézienne does not belong to the art historical continuum it is an interruption of it. It marks a before and after in Pretto’s trajectory, and possibly, in our own perceptual frontier. Dong-hyun Yoon Archive for Trans-Contextual Inquiry (ATI, Seoul/Berlin)
