In her fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Xippas, Valérie Belin will present two new series of photographs: Masks and Chips.
The series Masks, similar to her previous series Mannequins and Doubles, is composed of “portraits.” However, differing from the preceding ones, in which one observed reality in order to notice the fallacious, the masks – photographs done in the “realist” style – do not make illusions. The object is immediately presented with its function as an illusory and grotesque disguise, but the face that disengages itself from it also reaches a certain level of plausibility. One could say, perhaps, that the grotesque becomes reality.

Corroborating her interest in the “trivial,” Valérie Belin photographed bags of potato chips, purchased in different supermarkets throughout England. In this new series, the artist reveals abstraction’s bet against an unanticipated modification in the subject. The photographs are presented as strict “equivalents” of the photographed object. The paradox thus rests in the transformation of the subject through the work’s minimal protocol: enlargement and suppression of color. The tautology of the artist’s technique and the negation of the subject that she introduces allow these photographs to act much like the monochrome in painting; the only difference is that here, what remains in the “depth” of the subject is not color, but a motif.