Catherine Balet’s new series Moods in a Room plays with virtual reality by mixing pictorial textures and digital photographic elements. Using images she collects from her personal archives, she superimposes them in multiple layers, giving a material feel to the unreal and a virtuality to her material images. The resulting compositions reveal the various states of consciousness of the artist, and illustrate her commitment to endlessly explore the dualities between content and absence, space and surface.
Fannie Escoulen, curator, writes: “ …Catherine Balet has been building for years the successive layers of memories, a palimpsest, drawing references to the great movements of painting…. Hockney, Bacon, Picasso and so many others invite themselves to her table, interacting with the work in progress. Yet the artist deliberately frees herself from the great masters and feeds on many other materials. And it is indeed in this overflowing imagination, in this irrepressible desire to express the world around her, that Catherine Balet reveals our desires, fantasies and fears in the open and claims, in an artistic posture at the crossroads, a great freedom of expression, embracing the possibilities of creation with its ever-expanding limits.”
Catherine Balet graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and worked as a painter before turning to photography. She anchors her art in contemporary reality questioning the evolution of society, while linking it to references from past culture. She has exhibited worldwide and has published three previous books, Identity, Strangers in the Light (both Steidl) and Looking for the Masters in Ricardo’s Golden Shoes (Dewi Lewis) where she paid tribute to the Masters of photography and captured the history of photography, searching for ways to reflect on its future. In Moods in a Room, Catherine Balet continues her experimentation by questioning the technical transformations of the photographic medium and explores the relationship between painting and photography. She is represented by the Thierry Bigaignon Gallery.
Catherine Balet : Moods in a Room
Dewi Lewis Publishing
£35.00
quarterbound hardback 120 pages, 71 colour plates 285mm x 240mm
ISBN: 978-1-911306-59-7
