V. Valima’s paintings come about slowly, building layer upon layer. Much like a metaphor, they don’t unpack fully when put into words. What emerges, rather than a single story, is a collection of overlapping stories.
In all of his paintings Valima aim’s to create interesting surfaces and colour harmonies. He tends to move somewhere between the figurative and the abstract while also balancing between detailed techniques and more broad, atmospheric washes of colour. Valima primarily paints with brushes but he also uses printing techniques to create different kinds of organic textures.
For inspiration Valima mostly turns to human beings and nature. His current paintings depict constellations of different kinds of organic shapes. These paintings examine the material processes called ”life” and the boundary between living and non-living matter. As a motif living processes fascinate Valima because of their ambiguous nature: they are easy to understand at the practical level, but very hard to define philosophically (scientifically).
The surfaces in Valima’s paintings are mostly created by layering, which means they also need time to dry in between. This gives the paintings room to breathe – and the artist gets an opportunity to let go of them, and to see them afresh as he returns to them. Valima finds that this slow process produces paintings that reward revisiting and provide ample ground for the viewer’s gaze to wander in.