Fondation Guignard

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Prizewinners

2022- Valérie Masson

Valérie Masson

The Guignard Foundation awards this year’s prize to the artist, Valérie Masson. The prize recognises and rewards an original, intense and persevering body of work, which has remained relatively unknown until now. its symbolic value is intended to serve as an encouragement for the future.

©Mario Del Curto

The need for drawing

Valérie Masson lives in Lausanne in a small one-floor flat where the French window opens onto trees. Her living space is jammed with piles of drawings, while the walls are plastered with graffiti, sometimes up to the ceiling. As a teenager, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

"I have always drawn. Drawing and writing started in my mother's womb. To feel good, I need to hold a pen. As a child I called it drawing, but not anymore. Paper and drawings are prayers that speak to others, and they travel. My role is to be a keyhole between two worlds. Drawing is a potential vehicle for spirits who demand to speak to people or just want to be present. Why does one soul come and not another? I don't have the answer. I see presences and spirits. Dead people speak through me to communicate with a living person. The journey has been laborious because I didn't know anything. Drawing exhausts me, but the pleasure is enormous. I would like my drawings to be simpler, more accessible. Would that be more relaxing? I'm not sure I’d enjoy the rest – or being quiet. I just want to get out of my head. I am told that I can make a bird, a fish in three strokes. But I don't care what people think about my drawing. The pile of drawings are the lungs of my flat, but I can part with them easily because I am not attached to them. It's the drawing that chooses its recipient. I would even say to them: ‘Go ahead, do your work! I've done mine and yours is to go.’ If they stay, it's because there's a reason. Am I holding them back? They have to go, otherwise for whom or what did I make them? Not for me.

I read a lot, but the drugs make it hard for me to concentrate. So I get bored for lack of intellectual nourishment. I also write. Writing fascinates me because I lose my memory. I forget everything and live in the moment. My brain receives a lot of information that I can't retain. But I try to work on my memory. I write down what my guides, the angels, tell me. I used to say to my psychiatrist: When you have a sickness, you have sick angels, strong angels. From now on, I also write for myself, to find myself, and to be able to reread the information the words contain so as not to forget it, because it is precious. They are like revelations. I am constantly guided.

Sometimes the illness takes over and I need to go to hospital. If I am well cared for and well accompanied, the idea of getting better makes me sad. If, at 45, I wake up from a life of psychosis, will the shock be bearable? I am afraid of being bored – that is already the case – of having nothing more to say and of not knowing how to develop myself. I swing between the desire to get better and the desire to stay with the disease, because it is an opportunity, this disease! When I decompensate, my mind rushes at incredible speed and I have extraordinary experiences of different forms of existence. I call them spiritual and cosmic initiations. But my extreme sensitivity has damaged me.

Sometimes I would like to leave, go to the seaside and talk to the fish. I'm kidding! I've been talking to fish all my life!