Horticulture is deeply rooted in artist Conie Vallese’s creative psyche. As a child growing up in Buenos Aires, she remembers being asked by her paternal grandmother, who grew roses, to make a bouquet to decorate the lunch table. Decades later, as she lives between New York and Milan, their fragrant abundance still permeates her mind, sometimes consciously, but often unconsciously.
The muted tones of a recent still-life painting, for example, depict a table laden with flowers, its linen tablecloth stained with the remains of a communal meal. ValleseIn retrospect, this interior is reminiscent of her grandmother’s house, evoking the melancholic memory of post-lunch naps, when all that remained were the delicate flowers.
“For me, flowers are very nostalgic. They can light up a room with their harmony, but they also convey a feeling of sadness,” says
A 38-year-old artist and keen gardener, she spent the pandemic in a rural corner of Portugal’s Atlantic coast, tending to plants and vegetables and propagating everything from cosmos and lilies to her own floral obsession: dahlias.
Today, botany continues to permeate every aspect of her increasingly diverse practice, which spans ceramics, glass, textiles, paintings and bronze. Her most recent collection, a series of chairs and tables entitled Bronze flowerIt was conceived in the summer of 2023 during a month-long residency in Battaglia Artistic Fonderiathe Milanese bronze foundry that has specialized in the art of lost-wax casting (where a duplicate sculpture is created from an original) for over a century.
“It was a very special time for me,” says Vallese, who spent weekdays working with the foundry to bring prototypes to life; on weekends, he escaped to the Italian countryside to swim and hike. What began as a desire to make more functional works evolved into the creation of sketches and miniature models in cardboard and clay, mimicking the form of the simple, stackable chairs Vallese used in high school in Argentina.
“Working with soft wax is a very tactile experience,” he says of sculpting the silhouettes that shape his final casts. Each of the five chairs Vallese has made to date is topped with handmade ceramic flowers before being cast entirely in wax and then in bronze. “A chair is an iconic piece of design,” he says. “In bronze it becomes a sturdy, timeless, durable object imbued with historical significance.”
On display in April Bedroom During Milan Design Week and at India Mahdavi’s Project Room #12 for the Paris Design Show Matter and form A month earlier, the series had taken on a life of its own. Imbued with a textured bronze patina, the ergonomic high school chair becomes almost ethereal. Vallese is currently creating an alternative version with a reddish patina that reflects the apocalyptic heat of the smelting furnace.
Rather than a replica, it is a conscious effort to allow his work to develop, chrysalis-like, at its own pace – a stark contrast to the breakneck productivity that often dominates the industry. “I like to take my time,” he says. “I try to stick with a particular piece for a while, to give things space and air to evolve. I come back to them again and again.”
A glass vase made for the Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery
Vallese cutlery collaboration with Orit Elhanati
This slow-growth ethos is a luxury largely achieved by the fact that Vallese has found success in not one, but two creative fields. Known for her androgynous, heavily browed beauty, since 2017 she has worked as a model alongside some of the fashion industry’s most prominent photographers, designers and stylists, though she still doesn’t really consider herself a model. “I say no and yes based on my desires,” she says. “I don’t consider myself a model even in jobs – that’s a bit of a battle.” She walked in Phoebe Philo’s farewell show for Céline and, more recently, has appeared in campaigns for Bottega Veneta.
The daughter of an interior designer and a doctor, Vallese studied film in Argentina but didn’t consider art as a viable career until she moved to New York in 2012. That’s when she began drawing and sketching in earnest, prompted by memories of her maternal grandmother, Esther, who painted until her death at age 96. “In the last years of her life, she would get stuck in one corner of the same canvas,” Vallese says. “It was so thick with layers of oil paint that it took on a sculptural quality. That stayed with me.”
Vallese is now preparing for a solo exhibition in Etesiana Gallery At Menorca, which opens in October, her still lifes and interior paintings will be displayed side by side, some of which have been turned into hand-woven wool and silk wall-hanging rugs. Each tapestry, produced outside Paris, contains more than 100 colours; it took more than four months to make, in exact replica, the oil-painted originals. “The idea came from a place of frustration, of not being happy with my paintings,” Vallese says. “I wanted them to become more tangible. Whenever I go to museums, I feel a compulsion to touch or enter the art.”
Paintings have also proved a fruitful starting point for her ceramic panels. “I always feel most comfortable painting with clay,” she says of tile works on walls, which include a recent commission for a 2m by 1.4m ceramic mural that now hangs in a kitchen in Amsterdam. Vallese makes each tile by hand before drawing directly onto the dry surface and then glazing them. Her aim is to one day fill an entire room with these painterly ceramics, which have inspired a series of tile furniture including benches and tables that will be exhibited later this year in a project with Florence-based arts organisation, Numerators.
Vallese oscillates between the desire to immerse himself in city life and the dream of escaping, most recently to the Sicilian islands of Alicudi and Filicudi. The only works of his own that Vallese owns are a sterling silver Jardin cutlery set adorned with black diamonds that he created with the jeweler Orit Elhanatiand a bronze chair. “I am hungry for different experiences,” she says. “But the process of the work is simple. I want to bring beauty and softness to a world full of mediocre consumerism that distracts us from our inner life.” Craft, for Vallese, is a “moment of stillness” that reminds her to slow down and transports her back to that Edenic rose garden.