Valerie DUFAU was born in 1966 in Talence near BORDEAUX, in the Gironde, FRANCE.

When a child she was already attracted by pictures and soon her skill at drawing was noticed together with her original personality, a combinaison of extreme sensitiveness and strong temper. She was naturally advised on art studies.

In 1989, after she got her Bachelor's plastic arts degree (at Bordeaux III University and fine arts College). She went working at la Jolla Contemporary Art Museum in San Diego, California.

There she familiarized herself with across the Atlantic art professional circles.

Back in France, she qualified as a plastic arts teacher, holder of the CAPES.

During the year's training for the qualification she awakened to a passion for real painting: liberated from academic constraints, she expressed herself in big size canvas and wooder supports.

In 1993, during a year's sabbatical in the United States of America, she exhibited her works at the Positive gallery in Los Angeles, California. Then she began working to order.

She defines her painting as a "symbolic representational abstraction", utterly contrasted terms that convey the distinctive features of her art: contrasted matters, mat aspect and brilliance, relief and flatness and contrasted colours, natural shades and sparkling colours.

This subtle combination of matters and colours goes with incisive lines.

Her painting is a sensory painting which arouses all our senses.

She plays with monochromes, matters, signs, styles of drawing.

She likes biblical, mythological and psychoanalitical references.

She works on symbolic abstraction, at portraits showing character breaking away from perfect realism.

Her favourite theme is the body: one that combines flexibility, strength, subtlety and dynamism.

At times her touch is discreet, at times evanescent, at times aggressive.

Always there is a relation with tangible reality; often there is a story.

The spectator will enjoy peering into this world to try to percieve what is concealed behind the lines.