VALENTIN RILLIET

Valentin Rilliet (1996, Geneva) lives and works in Switzerland. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2020) and recently obtained his MFA in Fine Arts at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (2023). Valentin Rilliet is a recipient of the Yvonne Lang-Chardonnens Stiftung – Excellenzstipendium (2023) and has undertaken residencies at Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai (2024) and Organhaus Art Space, Chongqing (2024). His early career was supported by the UCL Global Experience Bursary (2019), among other awards.

Valentin Rilliet is a visual artist working predominantly with painting. His practice blends mythologies, popular tales, and symbolism. Through an exploration of his heritage, he creates images marked by ambiguous narratives, interwoven with ghostly figures and motifs that draw on both Western and Eastern art histories.Employing magical realism as a method, Rilliet’s compositions evoke historical echoes while deliberately obscuring their origins, inviting viewers to navigate between what seems familiar and what resists classification. By combining the fictional and the documentary, his images evoke events that bear an imprint of the past yet blur any clear sense of origin. On the canvas, this becomes a dialogue—a way to deconstruct, collect, and contemplate the multiplicity of interpretations surrounding what appears to be a historical, or even archival, reproduction.