Valérie Belin

Description

Valérie Belin uses photography as an obsessive attempt to appropriate reality. She seeks to avoid the anecdote of form and to penetrate to the heart of things. Her photographs of glass objects made in Venice or the mirrors taken in decoration stores constitute the outcome of this research. At the same time, she is interested in the problematic of the body: wedding dresses, like car wrecks, speak of the absence of the body and of a certain desire for memory. In the series of flowers, the bouquets seem to fade before they even bloom; in the halles de Rungis, the carcasses speak to us of invisible animals. Valérie Belin always uses black and white, these colors that bring out the light. The choice of large formats plunges us into the heart of the subjects; their tight framing, cut off from any context, the cluttered and shimmering places make these images of great beauty obsessive.