Views on my creations
If the starting point of my first Tila collection is the Voodoo cult in Africa, I realized that my pieces can evoke universes sometimes very far from my first inspiration. For example, the skull of the great kingfisher suggests a Venetian mask to some and the padlock necklace is considered surreal and mysterious to others.
To begin, several people around me chose a piece from my first collection and wrote a few lines about what it evokes for them.
Thanks to Nathalie, David, Andrea and Agnès who opened the way…
Petite Perruche ring between 2 fingers by Nathalie Sokierka
“My choice fell on this magnificent ring “Between 2 fingers” which evokes in my eyes a really original version of “You and Me”, jewels that I particularly like.
The composition of this piece reminds me of the Vanities of the eighteenth century by the meticulous representation, of the silver parakeet skull, adorned with a faceted garnet with the opposite an antique glass bead from Venice, and these tones seem to resurrect the baroque evenings of the city dear to Casanova.”
The Little Kingfisher necklace by David Meyer
“As an attentive spectator of the Voodoo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, I discovered in September 2011 the objects collected by Jacques Kerchache.
The magic of disenchantment, that of the spell, was already operating in me and for a long time I attached to all things the virtues of occlusions and those expansive that they could contain.
I linked spell cast or exorcised in a ceremonial mechanism, I applied it from then on in imagination to the world I was living with.
A dream where causalities and spells are one and the same, after all.
It is in Valérie Bui’s jewels that I became familiar with this idea.
Enchain to padlock the wish to the beak to literally nail him the verb, to tie money to the orbit blindly.
An incantatory jewel with noble reflections of silver and vermeil beak where the organic of a gleaming skull dialogues with the cult patina with the effects of smoke and blood (black Fancy of Venice); a rare multicoloured pearl touches in corolla a magic sphere.
A votive jewel, a love spell?
Valerie Bui proposes an object without charges other than its impeccable plasticity and its combinatorial beauty, a heterogeneous assembly of which one already knows that it operates the charm of which the carrier charges it. “
The Little Kingfisher cuff by Andrea Guinez
“From earth to sky
You do not say a word
Voluptuous breath
Enchanting star
Chagrined innocence
You go away with her
And your secret”.
Multi-symbol necklace by Agnès Lefebvre
“There is no art for art’s sake in Africa. Artists do not sign their works.
African artistic productions always respond to a need for protection against the vicissitudes of life around the major themes of human existence: to promote fertility in a very broad sense that goes from procreation to harvest, to counter disease and death, to attract the favor of the ancestors so that they fight together with the living.
The voodoo cult relays these universal themes through fetishes. The strength of the intentions of the fetishists emanates from these pieces whose energy is matched only by the will to keep the profane away. Valérie Bui’s “jewel-fetishes” take on this life impulse. They contain this protective power thanks to the use of the strong symbols of the voodoo: the skull of bird, the padlock which locks the vow to the jewel, the extraordinary stones found at random but whose characteristic is associated with a supernatural magnetism…
All these symbols are present in Valérie Bui’s work and transmit a spiritual force to the precious metal. They are the evocation of the powers at work which go from a wingbeat to telluric and galactic movements. They materialize the limits between the tangible world and the one that goes beyond reason and consciousness.”