Valéry Belin at Museu Picasso in Barcelona

Written by Joas Nebe.

Valéry Belin (born 1964) experiments with the emotional and cognitive reactions images provoke within viewers, exploring photography and moving images as dominant narrative forces shaping contemporary perception. Photographs occupy public and private spaces ubiquitously; after more than 180 years of technical and cultural evolution, photographic and cinematic imagery follow entrenched narrative grammars established by Hollywood’s production machinery (genre conventions), the star system (pronounced chiaroscuro and extreme camera angles), and magazine photography (dense detail and unusual vantage points). Belin’s work deliberately references those storytelling structures and their codified visual language. Although no recourse to artificial intelligence appears in her practice, resulting images maintain a tenuous link to empirical reality; digital capture serves as base material, subsequently transformed at the monitor by image‑editing programs in a manner comparable to certain contemporaries, such as Andreas Gursky.

Gursky’s photographs likewise undergo analogue digital alterations, a fact which becomes apparent only upon close inspection through recurring motifs and repeating elements which reveal tableau‑like compositions as constructed images. Belin’s early oeuvre employs analogous strategies. In the Mannequin series she photographs shop dummies under modeled, naturalistic lighting, accentuating the plastic figures’ corporeality; rendered in black and white, shoulder portraits acquire an unsettling sensuality arresting the viewer momentarily. Confronted today by a visual culture saturated with AI‑generated imagery, trained eyes, including mine, often oscillate between reading such works as digitally fabricated or as hand‑crafted; the unmediated perception contemporary beholders possessed at the time of production (2003), and thus the artist’s immediate visual context, has largely fallen out of reach. Perceptual shifts have likely liberated the depicted woman from the artist’s original intent, producing an interpretation distinct from Belin’s aim. The sensation which endures, however, remains irritation.

Belin shares with Thomas Ruff a predilection for seriality. Where Ruff repeatedly depicts actual rooms, open doors, made and unmade beds, tables with cloths (Interieur Series, https://www.thomasruff.com/en/works/interiors/), Belin composes objects within series‑based photographic constructs. In Venecia II she turns to Murano mirrors: whenever mirrored glass registers the viewer’s reflection, Belin inserts yet another mirror into the frame, so the object dedicated to narcissistic use dissolves into recursive self‑regard. Playfulness replaces Ruff’s documentary coolness; artificiality governs the pictorial world and only the frames hint at the photographed referent.

Black‑Eyed Susan (2010), a still life series evoking 1950s domestic aesthetics, stages an interplay between art‑historical vanitas and vernacular family photography. Baroque still life traditions, Dutch compositions which foreground food while alluding to Christian myth, Spanish variants emphasize interstices as memento mori, are invoked only to be negated: objects assert themselves purely as spectacle. Large items juxtapose with small, toys sit beside jewelry and household appliances, artificial flowers mingle with a recurring mannequin head. A reddish cast, reminiscent of faded Agfa color prints exhumed from an old family album, endows surfaces with temporal traces; yet metaphorical layering is effaced. Things remain things, their chromatic aging marking temporal passage while plastic durability implies anachronistic persistence.

Belin reaches a zenith of artifice in the ALL star series. Images resemble mid‑century magazine covers; Lovelorn, a fabrication by the artist, borrows graphic conventions from superhero and pop comics, bold outlines around figures, areas of flat color for face, hair, hands, while simultaneously destabilizing the comics’ artificially engineered narrative psychology (speech balloons, onomatopoeic sound‑words with directional cues) through insertion of a photographic portrait of a young woman. The portrait, rendered semi‑transparent by filters, introduces spatial depth to the otherwise planar comic field and serves as a deliberate rupture within a tear. Photographic reality confronts the schematic comic world, infusing routine superhero gestures and romantic scripts with the complexity of lived subjectivity. The result is perpetual oscillation between two narrative regimes, a peculiar flicker concentrated in the photograph’s transparency.

Photo credit:  Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Valéry Belin

Valéry Belin

Exhibition

Museu Picasso, Barcelona

Montcada, 15 – 23, 08003. Barcelona

Tel. 932 563 000

museupicasso@bcn.cat

www.museupicassobcn.cat