Still Life, Valérie Belin's photography

Valérie Belin Still Life

Still life with mask, 2014. 

Still life with shoes, 2014.

Still life with animals, 2014.

Still life with bowl, 2014.

Still life with dish, 2014.

Still life with gloves, 2014.

Still life with mirror, 2014.

Still life with vase, 2014.

Still life with pearls, 2014.

Artist's Statement

The works for which I have been nominated, and which I am presenting here, fully espouse the artistic genre of the still life and, within that, the vanitas and memento mori (remember that you must die); they belong in this long pictorial – and now also photographic – tradition. The choice of objects – mass consumer items – makes them contemporary still lifes. Plastic is the dominant raw material. These objects come from all over the planet. They are purely decorative and have no function. Their use value is virtually nil. There is no real need that can justify the profusion of these cheap objects in discount stores; their only “justification” lies in the chaos resulting from the imperatives of international trade and the needs that are created to stimulate it.

In terms of sustainability, these still lifes thus offer a jarring commentary on the effects of our obsession with cheap objects, for not only is their material, plastic, emblematic of the wasteful use of raw materials, but it also represents a grotesque kind of immortality because of its non-biodegradable nature – an immortality that, one could say, is slowly killing the planet.

I treated these still lifes as science-fiction landscapes. Lunar visions. The exotic aspect of the objects, their bright glossiness, evoke a remote, magical world of fairies, magicians and artifices. The objects are chosen like so many illusions of a real world, a fantasy world. Each of these still lifes has a title, from the name of one of the insignificant objects in the image, chosen more or less at random: a dish, an animal figurine, a mirror, a bowl, pearls, a vase, a mask, shoes, gloves. Each ensemble seems not to belong to our world, and as such has a strange kind of trashiness. These useless objects, symbols of our hunger to consume, have replaced the objects that in traditional vanitas paintings symbolised the riches of nature (game, fruit, foods), or human activities and knowledge (represented, notably, by scientific instruments). In vanitas paintings such objects were juxtaposed with elements evoking the ineluctable triumph of death – usually, a human skull. Here, instead of the skull I have included a plastic mannequin head, arm or hand, suggesting a person asphyxiated or buried beneath the mass of dross.

Paradoxically, each ensemble forms a subtly ordered composition and obeys the laws of the genre in a kind of paroxysm of representation. These critical compositions can be perceived as the organic and metaphorical representation of a chaotic brain, but also of a new order in the world and in life forms, a new galaxy governed by a well organised disorder.

About the photographer

Born

1964, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

Nationality

French

Based in

Paris, France

About Valérie Belin

Valérie Belin trained at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Bourges from 1983 to 1988, and then went on to study the philosophy of art at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, where she was awarded a Diplôme d’Études Approfondies in 1989.

Her work has been shown in exhibitions in international venues including the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015), PHI Center, Montreal, Quebec (2014). Her work has appeared in several group exhibitions including A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014) Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2013), Nathalie Obadia Gallery, Brussels (2014) and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York (2013). Amongst the collections that have acquired her work are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul.