Bianco Ordinario
Helene Bellenger
Launched in the summer of 2021, Hélène Bellenger’s Bianco Ordinario project is rooted in the marble quarries of Carrara, in Italy’s Apuan Alps. Renowned for centuries for their white marble, in high demand among artists and designers, these quarries are now overexploited to produce marble powder — pure calcium carbonate. Among other things, marble powder is used in toothpaste, make-up, paper or cleaning products, making it an integral part of the history of «whitening» and, by extension, of Western visual culture’s whiteness.
Hélène Bellenger has started a collection of cardboard packaging, using the back to print out artworks. Statuary’s luxurious and imperial aesthetics, usually associated with marble, are thus reduced to a small piece of printed package. Fragile, precious and unique, but also ephemeral and disposable, these images, whose shapes change according to the product, offer a typology of industrial forms, while also presenting selected images of the landscapes that intensive exploitation of Carrara marble has disfigured.
The theme of alteration echoes through this project, which deals both with landscapes disfigured by the intensive extraction of Carrara marble and with the creativity of the images printed on cardboard packaging. The creative process’s serial and random nature takes the image out of its traditionally square format, presenting instead truncated and altered images, with unexpected framing and sometimes damaged shapes, and colours that are subject to the variations in the cardboard and its texture
