Valerie Deleon

Valerie Deleon graduated with a degree in journalism and began her career as an interviewer, drawn to the depth of people’s lives and thoughts. Her transition into art emerged almost unintentionally: she first began cutting and assembling images as a way to articulate feelings that resisted verbal expression. Over time, collage became the medium through which she could navigate the space between seriousness and irony, beauty and critique; a space that resonated with her own way of understanding the world.
Blending her journalistic experience with a growing passion for visual storytelling, she started creating collages that draw on her personal experiences and the photographs she captured during interviews with well-known figures. With more than a decade of practice in both journalism and collage art, Valerie has exhibited widely in her home country and internationally. Her work centres on the singularity of each individual, offering a distinctive visual exploration of human stories through the interplay of photography and mixed media.

'My work is a form of visual storytelling born from the collision of inner landscapes and collective memory. Through the language of collage, I assemble fragments—of photographs, texts, and textures—to navigate the tensions between the personal and the archetypal, the absurd and the sincere, the playful and the political.
I’m drawn to contradictions: children wearing crowns while peering into treasure chests, men stitched into the folds of their own minds, or goats in therapy beneath portraits of Freud. These scenes are not constructed for logic, but for emotional resonance. I believe the subconscious speaks in symbols, and collage allows me to echo that language.
Old newspapers, handwritten notes, retro figures, celestial motifs—all these elements are my material vocabulary. I don’t aim to resolve narratives; I open them. Humor, nostalgia, and surrealism often co-exist in my pieces, forming emotional riddles rather than answers. This is how I make sense of a world that constantly fractures and reforms itself.
Collage is also an act of rebellion: against linearity, against silence, against the erasure of the irrational. I collect what is overlooked, dismissed, or disjointed and give it new life. What’s torn apart can be reimagined. Ultimately, my work is an invitation—to remember, to feel, and perhaps, to see things from an angle no one expected.'