The blossoming of Conie Vallese

Horticulture is deeply rooted in the creative psyche of artist Conie Vallese. As a child growing up in Buenos Aires, she recalls her paternal grandmother, who cultivated roses, asking her to gather a bouquet to decorate the lunch table. Decades later, as she lives between New York and Milan, their fragrant abundance still pervades her mind’s eye – sometimes knowingly, but often subconsciously. 

The muted tones of a recent still life painting, for instance, depict a flower-laden table, its linen tablecloth stained with the remnants of a communal meal. For Vallese, in hindsight, this interior recalls her grandmother’s home, evoking the melancholy memory of post-lunch siestas, when all that remained were the delicate blooms.

“For me, flowers are very nostalgic. They can light up a room with their harmoniousness, but there is also a sense of sadness to them,” says the
38-year-old artist. A keen gardener, she spent the pandemic in a rural corner of the Portuguese Atlantic coast, tending to plants and vegetables, and propagating everything from cosmos and lilies to her own floral infatuation – dahlias.

Today, botany continues to permeate every aspect of her increasingly diverse practice, which spans ceramics, glass, textiles, paints and bronze. Her most recent collection, a series of chairs and tables titled Bronze Bloom, was conceived in summer 2023 over the course of a month-long residency at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, the Milanese bronze foundry that has specialised in the art of lost-wax casting – where a duplicate sculpture is cast from an original – for more than a century.

“It was a very special time for me,” says Vallese, who spent weekdays working with the foundry to bring prototypes to life; at weekends she escaped to the Italian countryside to swim and hike. What began as a desire to make more functional works grew into the creation of sketches and miniature maquettes in card and clay, mimicking the form of simple, stackable chairs that Vallese used in high school back in Argentina.

Whenever I go to museums I have the compulsion to step inside the art

“Working in soft wax is a very tactile experience,” she says of sculpting the silhouettes that inform her final moulds. Each of the five chairs Vallese has realised to date is topped with handmade ceramic flowers before being entirely cast in wax and then bronze. “A chair is an iconic piece of design,” she says. “In bronze it becomes a resilient object that’s timeless, durable and imbued with historical significance.” 

On show both at April’s Alcova during Milan Design Week, and at India Mahdavi’s Project Room #12 for Paris design salon Matter and Shape a month earlier, the series has taken on a life of its own. Imbued with a textural bronze patina, the ergonomic high-school chair becomes almost ethereal. Vallese is currently creating an alternative version in a reddish patina that reflects the apocalyptic heat of the foundry’s furnace. 

Rather than a replication, this is a conscious effort to allow her work to develop, chrysalis-like, at its own pace – a stark contrast to the whirring productivity that often dominates the industry. “I like to take my time,” she says. “I try to stay with a particular work for a while, to give things space and air to evolve. Coming back to them again and again.” 

A glass vase made for the Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery

Vallese’s flatware collaboration with Orit Elhanati

This slow-burn ethos is a luxury enabled largely by the fact that Vallese has found success in not one, but two creative fields. Known for her strong-browed, androgynous beauty, since 2017 she has worked alongside some of the fashion industry’s most prominent photographers, designers and stylists as a model – though she doesn’t really view herself as a model, still. “I say no and yes according to my desires,” she says. “I don’t consider myself a model even in the jobs – that’s kind of the battle.” She walked in Phoebe Philo’s swansong runway show for Céline, and has more recently appeared in campaigns for Bottega Veneta.

The daughter of an interior designer mother and a doctor father, Vallese studied film in Argentina, but didn’t consider art a viable career until moving to New York in 2012. It was only then that she began sketching and drawing in earnest, fuelled by memories of her maternal grandmother, Esther, who painted until her death aged 96. “In the last years of her life, she got stuck in one corner of the same canvas,” says Vallese. “It was so thick with layers of oil paint it took on a sculptural feel. That stayed with me.” 

Vallese is now preparing for a solo exhibition at Etesian Gallery in Menorca, due to open in October, where her still life and interior paintings, some of which have been made into wall-hung, hand-tufted wool and silk rugs, will be displayed side by side. Produced outside Paris, each tapestry contains more than 100 colours – it took more than four months in order to realise, in exact replica, the oil paint originals. “The idea came from a place of frustration, of not being happy with my paintings,” says Vallese. “I wanted them to become more tangible. Whenever I go to museums I have the compulsion to touch or step inside the art.” 

The paintings have also proved a fruitful starting point for her ceramic panels. “I always feel more comfortable painting with clay,” she says of the tiled wall works, which include a recent commission for a 2m by 1.4m ceramic mural that now sits in a kitchen in Amsterdam. Vallese makes each tile by hand before drawing directly onto the dried surface and then glazing them. Her goal is one day to fill an entire room with these painterly ceramics, which have inspired a series of tile furniture including benches and tables that will go on display at the end of this year in a project with Florence-based art organisation, Numeroventi. 

Vallese shifts between a desire to be immersed in city life and the dream of escape – lately, to the Sicilian islands of Alicudi and Filicudi. The only works of her own that Vallese actually possesses are a set of the sterling-silver, black-diamond embellished Jardin flatware that she created with the jeweller Orit Elhanati, and a bronze chair. “I’m so hungry for different experiences,” she says. “But the process of the work is simple. I want to bring beauty and softness to a world full of mediocre consumerism that distracts us from our interior lives.” Craft, for Vallese, is a “moment of stillness” that reminds her to slow down, and transports her back to that Edenic rose garden.