This year, the museum is offering the public the possibility of discovering the works that the artist Ann Marie Valencia created in 1999 for the exhibition Aurélie, Betzy et les autres… (Aurélie, Betzy and the Others…)
Ann Marie Valencia was a painter whose works took no heed of time and fashions. Nevertheless, the works presented at the Villèle museum for her exhibition Aurélie, Betzy et les autres…(1999) recall the drama of a buried past, a time when harmony reigned between women and natural environment.
The memory of women … Women who ran the estate: Ombline Desbassayns (1755 – 1846), with an iron rod; Céline de Villèle (1820 – 1896), who did so submissively; Lucile (1901 – 1976) and Pauline (1902 – 1990) de Villèle, with abnegation.
There is also the memory of those faceless women, still present through being briefly recorded on the yellowed paper of documents in the archives: a more or less fanciful patronymic assigned to them arbitrarily by a dominating society; a function, not particularly original, but sufficiently evocative to remind us of the climate that reigned during the period of slavery; a vague identification with an ethnic group, with roots that did, however, get lost in the vague mists of an imprecise or even unknown locality; finally, each of the women had a commercial value, a sordid indication of her owner’s wealth that to us, looking back over time, seems as derisory as it is indecent.
The memory of a recent past does, however, highlight their history, memory of a constantly changing domestic environment, which, with the years, mingled cotton, coffee, spices and sugar-cane …
Ann Marie Valencia reconstructed a universe inhabited by women, beautiful women, beautiful in the accomplishment of their thankless tasks and their harrowing daily chores. Her works provide us with the gentle expression of her extremely mature artistic style. The intelligence of her vision reflects the contrasted beauty of faces marked by the harsh reality of their repetitive labours. Even though her light brushstrokes, as light as rose petals, delicately stroke the canvas, subtly covered with lightly creased tissue paper, the artist makes no concession to easy effects and seduction for the sake of it. Behind her works lies the artistic commitment of a painter of great authenticity, with the tender and respectful gaze of a woman for the Woman. Ann Marie Valencia also used the colours of emotion to recall, in her own way, the magnificent unearthed fragments of a painful history that still has not revealed all its secrets.
Jean Barbier
Honorary Curator of the Villèle Museum
“Over the years, I became very familiar with these places. There was only a river-bed separating my painting studio from the Chapelle Pointue and the Villèle museum. I gradually let myself become steeped in the colours of its gardens, its light and its history, so very present. Today, I realise to what extent I became drawn into the lives of these women and their stories…”
Ann Marie Valencia (1950-2012)
Domaine Panon-Desbassyns
Saint-Gilles-Les-Hauts
Tel. : 0262 55 64 10
Email: musee.villele@cg974.fr
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