He founded the musicalism movement and created 'La Symphonie printanière' (Spring Symphony), a unique abstract animation or "cinépeinture" (film-painting), a print of which was acquired in 2013 by the musée national d'art moderne in Paris and exhibited there from 23 October 2013 to 5 January 2015 (alongside seven of his paintings left to the French state) as part of its "Plural Modernities" hang.
He was therefore influenced by impressionism but expressed the need to renew pictorial art by liberating the artist from the purely objective vision that practice had crystallised into immobility.
Living comfortably on an inheritance, Valensi joined the Société des artistes indépendants and exhibited regularly each year at their Salon from 1908 onwards.
[2] In 1910-1911, Jacques Villon and František Kupka introduced Valensi to the chief editor of L'Assiette au beurre, a satirical review for which he provided anticolonial, anticapitalist, anticlerical and antimilitarist drawings.
[3] In 1912 he, Jacques Villon, Pierre Dumont, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia managed and organised the Salon de la Section d'Or.
Beside "Nude Descending a Staircase" by Duchamp, Valensi hung "The Air Around the Long Sawyers" (now in the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon).
Valensi considered that the last atage in the evolution of pictorial art consisted of introducing real movement into the space of the canvas, which led to "cinépeinture" produced by "cinépeintres" (film painters).
From 1936 onwards Valensi worked almost alone, with a camera installed on a bench in a maid's room serving as a studio, elaborating La Symphonie printanière, a 30 minute abstract animated film in colour, which he completed in 1959 using 64,000 drawings and based on a painting he had produced in 1932.
They defined themselves by introducing musical properties in pictorial plasticity, by knowing movement, rhythm and space-time - colour was a vibration only distinguishable from sound by its different wavelength.
Cinema (forty years old when Valensi created his moving painting or "cinépeinture") represented the ideal of inserting movement and giving a plastic form to time, the fourth dimension.
Valensi created the film almost alone, though the last scenes were produced in collaboration with his student Christiane Vincent-La Force, a musicalist painter forty years his junior, who ran a gallery.
The order in which he classified the colours was according to the energy they diffused and the feelings that they conveyed according to his plastic language - red referred to dynamism, orange to euphoria, yellow to joy, green to hope, blue to calm and indigo and violet to melancholy.