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DiggValerie Belin: Portraits
November 4, 2006- December 2, 2006
Valerie Belin
Sikkema, Jenkins & Co
530 W 22nd StSikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to announce our exhibition Valerie Belin Portraits, the inaugural show in the 2nd floor gallery.
For this new series, Belin has taken twelve color portraits of young models – six men and six women-- selected from the new faces catalogues of various Parisian modeling agencies.
In a striking departure from her previous black and white portraits with their diffused light, these portraits use pinpoint lighting. The model’s faces emerge, in color, from the stark black backgrounds. Each photograph illuminates the faces and highlights the velvety skin and unreal beauty of these youths.
These idealized beings suggest the avatars of virtual reality games. The photos have a spectral quality because Belin lights only one of the subject’s surface planes --there is no depth. In addition, the colors are deliberately muted which makes the flesh appear monochromatic and diaphanous; the eyes and mouth appear as color counterpoints, the faces like masks. The models’ skin, made-up and powdered for the sitting, presents a flawless surface, the perfection of which seems impossible, even supernatural. And finally, the almost total absence of any expression on the models’ faces and the vacuity of their gazes exacted by the artist transforms these human beings into chimeras.
The oppositions usually present in Belin’s work – between presence and absence, living and inanimate, what is emphasized and what is relegated to the background – raises the fundamental question: what does it mean to be alive today?
Belin is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; SFMOMA; Fondation CCF pour la Photographie, Paris, France, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France and the Cartier Foundation, Paris, France. Belin has had solo shows at the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne, Switzerland.Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian, Spain. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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