Delphine Balley, wax figures.
Bernard Chauveau| N° d'inventaire | 26788 |
| Format | 18 x 27 |
| Détails | 168 p., color illustrations, paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Paris, 2022 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782363063120 |
Wax Figures is a journey through time and the vernacular, developed around a set of three films and fifteen photographs taken with a view camera, complemented by a new sculptural work. Through a study of rites of passage, the artist explores the representation and dysfunction of social theater. The whole is constructed as a fragmentary narrative, in which the closed-door nature of the family portrait, the tradition of genre painting, the still life, and the iconography of ruin—that of the physical body as much as the social body—converge.
Through the construction of her own inventory of beliefs, Delphine Balley stages the social legacies and symbolic uses of places, from cradle to grave. The space of the domestic, omnipresent in her work, allows her to think of the image in different planes, evoking the temporalities of the narrative. The setting, in films as much as in photographic work, has a structural role: like an architecture of intimacy, it contains the rigidity of the family place, reflecting, literally, the inconvenience of positioning oneself. Nourished by the themes of pretense, metamorphosis, and disappearance, these associations that materialize our inner worlds summon both psychoanalysis and Surrealism.
Wax Figures is a journey through time and the vernacular, developed around a set of three films and fifteen photographs taken with a view camera, complemented by a new sculptural work. Through a study of rites of passage, the artist explores the representation and dysfunction of social theater. The whole is constructed as a fragmentary narrative, in which the closed-door nature of the family portrait, the tradition of genre painting, the still life, and the iconography of ruin—that of the physical body as much as the social body—converge.
Through the construction of her own inventory of beliefs, Delphine Balley stages the social legacies and symbolic uses of places, from cradle to grave. The space of the domestic, omnipresent in her work, allows her to think of the image in different planes, evoking the temporalities of the narrative. The setting, in films as much as in photographic work, has a structural role: like an architecture of intimacy, it contains the rigidity of the family place, reflecting, literally, the inconvenience of positioning oneself. Nourished by the themes of pretense, metamorphosis, and disappearance, these associations that materialize our inner worlds summon both psychoanalysis and Surrealism.