After China Girls in 2018 in Brussels, Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to present the fourth exhibition of the artist Valérie Belin, acclaimed as one of the most important photographers of her generation who benefits from a strong international visibility.
Revealed here to the public, the artist's new series, entitled Reflection and consisting of eleven black and white images, was produced as part of her solo exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (October 22, 2019 - August 31, 2020). On the occasion of this exhibition, several works from this series joined the collection of this prestigious institution.
Valérie Belin has worked on superimposing various previously unpublished photographs of shop windows and storefronts in Manhattan and other cities in New York state. She thus revisits a recurring theme in her work since the 1990s. The exceptional photographic collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum has been a resource for the artist, whether it be photographs created by the Worsinger Window Service (or Worsinger Photo) - a New York firm that specialized in documenting shop windows and interiors - or Robert Brownjohn's Street Level series focused on photographs of signs and typographies. The artist also refers to the work of Eugène Atget and of Walker Evans, the photographer par excellence of vernacular American culture, or even the photographs of Lee Friedlander.
A shop window is presented as a small urban theatre open to the street where goods are displayed and staged against a backdrop of decor. The shop window has always been a source of inspiration for Valérie Belin. In the early 90s, she first made photographs of jewelry and trinkets exposed in different shopping malls. Subsequently there came photographs of crystal vases and silverware (Verres I et Verres II, 1993-1994), photographs of glass objects and mirrors in several showrooms in Venice (Venise I, 1997), photographs of mannequins (Mannequins, 2003), and finally, photographs of storefronts in Luxembourg (Vitrines Luxembourg, 2003).
" The window is also a transparent surface - and paradoxically, a mirror. It's the place where the urban landscape briefly appears as a reflection, in a variable manner according to the time of day, the lighting, and the position of the spectator. A photograph of a window in fact contains two images that are superimposed in an arbitrary or erratic manner: the image of what is behind the window and the the image of the urban landscape that is reflected in the glass. The window is thus the place of overlay or an accumulation of two images: that of the interior and that of the exterior.
Like all photographers, I take pictures on a daily basis and build up an archive for future use. I had initially made these photographs with the intention of using them as backgrounds for a series of portraits. After having consulted the Victoria & Albert's collection of photographs, I realized that these images could acquire, through the manipulation of signs conveyed by the images, their proper autonomy and raison d'être as works of art.
Metaphorically, I would like that the captured images appear as if they were 'projected' on the photosensitive surface of a screen, but that instead of disappearing to be immediately replaced by other images (as in cinema), they will accumulate persistently. The photographic paper's role in keeping the trace of the image will allow for there to be an apparition of the photographed landscape in the windows.
I am also inspired by the aesthetic of experimental cinema from the 1960s. In particular, I am thinking of Jonas Mekas' film Notes on the Circus (1966), which was created through a direct montage 'in the camera' by superimposing shots realized at different speeds. What also comes to mind is Robert Franck's Super 8 film in black and white that was for promoting the Rolling Stones' 1971 album Exile on Main Street; it reveals a similar aesthetic to that of the Mekas' aforementioned work.
This spatial and temporal accumulation of images on the sensible surface should contribute to the formation of a sort of 'mental' or 'interior' landscape, a landscape 'of spirit', imagined in a dream but consciously constructed by the filter of perception and culture - opposing the 'archaic', 'trivial', or 'primitive' landscape of public urban space which is reflected in the windows. "
Valérie Belin
