Valentin Ranger

“At the dawn of the 16th century, the painter Jérôme Bosch completed his Garden of Earthly Delights, a fascinating triptych illustrating fundamental Christian myths, from the creation of Adam and Eve in Eden to the horrors of hell and its sinful souls. A major work in which humans, demons and giant animals abound by the hundreds in a lush decor, sometimes caught up in the excesses of lust and gluttony, sometimes in those of anger and punishment. Four centuries later, this abundance could well find its echo in the work of Valentin Ranger: freed from the religious fervor of his Dutch elder, the work of this young French artist also gives pride of place to enjoyment, desire and to excess. Phantasmagoric, his world is full of sperm-shrubs, heifer-women, phallic fruits and other butterfly-men who, without showing the slightest hostility, coexist in harmony to the point of merging their bodies in euphoric scenes."