The "poisonous" beauty of Valérie Belin

The model who opens the exhibition by French photographer Valérie Belin (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1964) at the Picasso Museum is an anonymous woman with a hairstyle reminiscent of the former editor of the American edition of Vogue, Anna Wintour. A woman who seems, at the same time, cold and sensual. But in this exhibition, nothing is as it seems, and when you get closer, you realize that the woman is, in reality, a mannequin. “It's from an old series, from 2003. At that time, I was interested in the appearance in cinema of somewhat fictitious characters, like Lara Croft [who came from a video game]. And, therefore, I was looking to create portraits of humanoids that were not people,” states Valérie Belin, who found the key to these works in the mannequins of designer Adel Rootstein, made with fragments modeled from real women.

“In general, all the people I photograph are people who want to become someone else. Or, even, an image. That is to say, they want to overcome their physical limits to achieve an ideal they take as an example from a stereotype. And here they are objects made from molds of real women. Therefore, they are already, in fact, three-dimensional photographs,” explains the artist. “They are hybrid beings – she adds – because there is the face of one woman, the arms of another woman, and the legs of a third. And the result is an ideal being that has the wasp beauty stereotype as its model. We might think she is a beautiful woman, and when we get closer, unease suddenly sets in because we see that everything is false: we see that the eyebrows are hand-painted, that the eyes are also painted, that the skin texture is too perfect.”

Picasso, “a demon and a master”

Valérie Belin is considered one of the most prominent figures in post-photography, with images in which the line between reality and illusion blurs. She has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, MoMA in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Elysée Museum in Lausanne, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, and the European House of Photography in Paris, and has just joined the French Academy of Fine Arts. “For me, the aesthetic experience is a very intimate experience in which we are invited to turn back to ourselves and to ask ourselves about very fundamental things of being, of emotions,” says the artist.

Regarding exhibiting at the Picasso Museum, Belin assures that, for artists around the world, the Malaga-born artist is at the same time “a demon and a master, someone fascinating and repulsive at once”. She had visited the museum about thirty years ago, but had never imagined she would exhibit there. “Picasso has the ability to give us courage when it comes to doing things, not to self-censor. It is true that Picasso also took women as his main theme, but for probably different reasons than mine –she explains–. However, he took women as a multitude of muses, of people he transformed, metamorphosed with his art and, in a way, in my photographs there is also this dimension of the muse, the omnipresence of woman, who for me now are also women that I create, who become fictional characters and who are like allegories or mythologies”.

Valérie Belin's work has an autobiographical character. “I believe the key word in my work is this search for self-sublimation, that is to say, going beyond one's own limits, being extraordinary. And women do it perhaps more than men, because the patriarchal society has always conveyed the idea that women's power was mainly linked to seduction. Therefore, to have power, women had to seduce. That is why, in this phenomenon of alienation that we live today, with social networks, mass consumption and globalization, I think women are ahead of men, because they have precisely been made to understand that their appearance was their first strength”, she says. Furthermore, she explains that in her images there is a “ontradiction between two opposing movements: life, death, the living, the non-living, passivity and action, silence and expression, absence and presence”. “They are paradoxical images”, she warns. On the other hand, she has deployed the same vision in other groups, such as bodybuilders and transsexual people. “When I photographed bodybuilders and transsexuals, I was in contact with a humanity with which I had an empathetic relationship and which was really a strong enough human relationship”, she emphasizes.

Between Cindy Sherman and Alfred Hitchcock

Another portrait features a clown mask that may evoke the often grotesque self-portraits of the American photographer Cindy Sherman. “We have in common the representation of the woman who transforms, who metamorphoses into a kind of seduction and repulsion at the same time. But while she critiques consumerism, I focus on beauty, seduction, and the poisonous aspect of beauty. I would be closer to a Hitchcockian heroine,” explains Belin.

The exhibition at the Picasso Museum includes 32 photographs, among which there are also some still lifes, related to Belin's interest in the Baroque. In one, the fruits are real, but they shine as if they were made of plastic. Another is constructed with a mountain of plastic fakes: “They are very classic compositions, reminiscent of the tradition of painted still life. But here everything is fake. And everything has lost its use value. And, by way of comparison, we are also led to realize the destructive and filthy aspect of these objects. Because, in reality, they have no place in the world. And we find them in the oceans. They are indestructible. They are filth.”