Learning from Martigny

Artist's book

In “Learning from Las Vegas” (1977), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, as a call to reinvigorate architectural design with symbolic content, advocated the study of the commercial strip and in particular, the role that signs play in conveying meaning and providing order to the landscape. In “Learning from Martigny,” Valentin Carron (*1975, lives and works in Martigny, Switzerland), offers a photo-documentation of his surroundings—the sources for some of his works—intertwined with images of his sculptures or paintings. If Carron’s sculptures mark a renewal of appropriation through the re-employment of vernacular forms that are not part of the dominant culture, the artist develops a project confusing genres. Neither authentic nor kitsch, neither readymade nor really craft, his objects play with ambiguity (fake wood, fake concrete, fake bronze, etc.) and with an iconography of power and authority (public sculptures or commemorative monuments, traditional forms, etc.). Designed by the studio Gavillet & Rust/Eigenheer, this artist’s book includes a new contribution by the writer Nicolas Pages.

Published in collaboration with La Conservera, Murcia.

Awarded in the competition “The most beautiful Swiss books.”