Arles 2012: Aurore Valade

Aurore Valade – ENSP 2005 Aurore Valade builds her photographs around her models’ stories and tales. She stages their daily lives, hence questioning our ways of life and our private spaces. The photographs in this exhibition are constructed according to three classical painting genres: the portrait, interior scenes and vedute. Each composition is the fruit of a meticulous labour of photomontage and retouching. But, despite these technical interventions and redefinitions, the photographs retain a realistic power and remain faithful to the truth of the actual moment when they were taken. Valade’s work refers to an essay by the German poet and critic Rainer Maria Rilke called Notes on the Melody of Things (1898), in which he reflects upon the theme of the portrait in works of art. In Rilke’s writings, the view of the background is similar to a melody, in which each character is part of a choir, each person’s voice contributing to create the harmony of the whole. According to the poet, it is not – therefore – the faithful reproduction of a character that creates the possibility of a relationship. What is instead more important is the representation and the understanding of the ‘world’ in which the subject lives, the world hidden behind the figure. A space which, in the works presented in Arles, is presented like an interior loaded with objects and memories, a space which opens on the perspective view of the town or on the shared and globalised world spoken about in the media – newspapers, television – present in these photographs. Maria Cristina Strati Aurore Valade Born in 1981 in France. Lives and works in France and Italy. After studying at the Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Aurore Valade attended the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, graduating in 2005. Her work Intérieurs avec Figures (Interior with faces) was awarded the 2005 Bourse de Talent Prize, 2006 Quinzaine Photographic Nantaise Prize and the 2008 Fondation HSBC pour la Photographie Prize. A monography Grand Miroir (Big Mirror) was published by Actes Sud Editions, followed by Plein Air (Outdoors), published during the same year by Diaphane Editions. Her recent exhibitions have been held at the Institut Français in Rome, in 2012, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark and at the Photaumnales in Beauvais, in 2011. In 2010, her works were shown at the Marino Marini Museum in Florence, and at the following galleries: Sintitulo, in Mougins, Steiglitz19, in Anvers, GAS, in Turin, 10b Photography, in Rome. In 2008 she exhibited at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York, at the Baudoin Lebon gallery in Paris, Museum of Modern Art in Collioure and at the Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux. Aurore Valade is represented by the galleries Gagliardi Art System, Stieglitz19 and Sintitulo.