Visual Arts – pastel painting & drawing
Ghislaine Fremaux and Lando Valdez are pastel painters that live and work in the Texas Panhandle. They inaugurated their collaborative partnership in 2018 and began exhibiting together in 2020. The pair undertake the ideational development and technical execution of each piece in close dialogue, often working shoulder-to-shoulder, or in frequent alternation. Lando is a portraitist and painter, maintaining professional practices in fine and commercial arts. Ghislaine is Associate Professor of Art at Texas Tech University.
At the Anderson Center, Ghislaine and Lando developed a series of large-scale, intricately collaged, and sometimes sculpturally formed pastel pieces that examine the corporeal experience of bereavement, cultural and medical understandings of the gut, and related forms of healing. Through the infirmity of chalk pastel and the mutability of paper, their works emphasize ephemerality and recognize the body as an active and inchoate process, rather than a fixed thing. Ghislaine and Lando believe that the immense scale of their paintings should serve this end, enabling the body to take the form of an emerging order that organizes itself before and around the viewer. While in-residence, the pair connected with painter Lindsay Cherek Waller, who maintains year-round studio space at the Anderson Center, for artistic exchange and career development.