Painted Ladies

Painted Ladies, signed and numbered 800 copies, consists of a series of portraits of women made in 2017 whose faces have been reworked: each bears the marks of a brush used to paint and apply make-up. Brushes and pigments evoke tribal painting; these images seem to be the result of initiation rites. With their eyes absent, each woman is distinguished by her pictorial style: the superimposition of layers inscribes the image with a certain abstraction. In an obsessive desire to appropriate reality, Valérie Belin fixes her lens on the surface of people and things to better reveal their density and enigmatic character. Her work in series, based on a subtle interplay of repetition and variation, gives her images a minimalist rigour. His photographs appear both flat and sculptural, two-dimensional and voluminous.

 

This artist's book has been conceived as a showcase: the delicate textures of the different Japanese papers reveal, through shimmering effects, the portraits of these eight women, accompanied by an unpublished text by Éric Reinhardt that evokes the idea of the multiplication of identity.