Over the past two decades, French artist Valérie Belin has created a body of work that challenges and manipulates the indexical nature of the photographic surface to explore ideas of beauty, artifice, and illusion. Her most recent series, Painted Ladies, is composed of 8 large-scale black-and-white photographs and is currently on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery, in New York.
Painted Ladies continues Belin’s fascination with the human body as a powerful vessel for abstraction and projected meaning. Inspired by early twentieth-century expressionist painters, Belin collaborated with make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench to paint models with various brushes in the manner of initiatory tribal rituals. These brushes lend their names to the individual titles of the works, such as Lady Round Brush, Lady Pastel, and Lady Inpainting, and also mirror the equivalent digital retouching tools found in the image-processing software that Belin employs.
Belin has stated that her work originates from painting. In these works, the models’ faces are metamorphisized and reduced to canvas-like surfaces, whose expressions have been assigned and actualized by the artist. The pictorial quality of each image, abstracted beyond portraiture, is created by the painterly interventions on the models before the photograph is taken and the digital processing of the images after the photography occurs. This interrogation regarding the nature of the image, the process involved, and what the viewer is actually looking at, creates a sense of uncertainty that questions the power of surface as a signifier. Presenting these meta-clichés in a larger-than-life scale, the series reframes the recurring questions of the relations between photography and painting, figuration and abstraction, and reality and fiction. A fantastic series.
Valérie Belin, Painted Ladies
March 2 to 31, 2018
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 5th Ave #407
New York, NY 10151
USA
