Valerie Belin - Silent Visions (English Edition)

Through her images saturated with visual signs, as is the case of her most recent works, Valérie Belin plays with the codes of representation and blurs the boundaries between reality and the imaginary. In doing so, she retraces the technological and ontological changes in photography, from analogue to digital, while following in the footsteps of the avant-gardes of the interwar period by adopting techniques such as overprinting and solarisation. Her use of colour, from 2006 onwards, bestows a more pictorial dimension and sometimes a boldly "collage-like” aspect on her works.

The artist likes to say that she does not produce “photographs of objects”, but “portraits of objects”, in which she sees a “metaphor of the body traversed by light”. The Bodybuilders with their bulging, oiled bodies find an echo in the metal carcasses of the wrecked Cars , while the storefront Mannequins often seem more human than their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

The catalogue includes approximately 100 works from the artist’s career, from the late 1990s to more recent series.