L’incertaine beauté du monde
Valérie Belin
Atelier EXB
French
Softcover
192 pages
210 x 280 mm
2023
ISBN 9782365113588
This monograph proposes, through some thirty series, to browse the work of Valérie Belin from the 1990s to the present day. Exploding the chronological order, a play of correspondences takes place between the artist’s different color and B&W series, which respond to each other, evolve and question our relationship to beauty, artifice and the impermanence of things. From shooting to retouching, the photographer creates with successive strokes and layers, like a painter playing on the ambivalence between the living and the artificial. The people represented, whether they are models, clown figures or Michael Jackson look-alikes, are for the most part in a transitional state towards “the desire to transform themselves into images”, specifies Valérie Belin, while her objects, like vintage cars or other wrecked cars, his collector’s engines or dresses seem animated, sublimated by the lens. The result is images with strong aesthetic and evocative power that embody both “the drama and the beauty of the world”, as Sébastien Gokalp points out in his text. The book accompanies the retrospective of the artist presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Tourcoing, the MUba Eugène Leroy, from March 17 to August 27, 2023.
(source: https://exb.fr/fr/le-catalogue/572-l-incertaine-beaute-du-monde.html)
About the Artist
Valérie Belin was born in 1964 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. She lives and works in Paris, France.
valeriebelin.com
About the Publisher
Atelier EXB / Éditions Xavier Barral publish books taking a visual approach to the new shapes of photography, contemporary art and sciences. Founded in 2002 by Xavier Barral, the publishing house conceives each book where style and content meet to tell an astonishing and singular story. Raising curiosity through the image and bringing one to discover new artistic voices, subjects that belong to our history. Each book is a singular object whose aesthetic, philosophical, and design choices take pride of place. Different points of views meet between artists and authors from around the world such as Valérie Belin, Daniel Buren, Sophie Calle, Clément Chéroux, Raphaël Dallaporta, Raymond Depardon, Masahisa Fukase, Rinko Kawauchi, William Kentridge, Josef Koudelka, Sergio Larrain, Erik Orsenna, Alberto Manguel, Annette Messager, Martin Parr, Eric Reinhardt, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Jeff Wall.
The catalogue lists over 180 critically acclaimed titles including D’après nature by Jean Gaumy, Vers l’Orient by Marc Riboud (2012) and So Long China by Patrick Zachmann (2016), recipients of The Nadar Prize, as well as Anticorps by Antoine d’Agata, winner of the Rencontres d’Arles Festival 2013 Author Book Award. More recently, Sergio Larrain won the Krasna-Krausz Book Award (2014) and Images of conviction the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award (2015).
exb.fr
(source: https://photolondon.org/exhibitors/2023-2/atelier-exb/)
