Artist
Helene Bellenger
Bianco Ordinario
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
Léonie Pondevie's photographic form is composite, arranged by the aggregation of clues: contemporary shots, collected archive images and shared personal documents sit side by side like evidence of an ongoing investigation into complex and evolving realities. In Un point bleu pâle, she follows in her meteorologist father's footsteps and contemplates the clouds, assembling everything from particle images to archival documents and new photographs.
If Hélène Bellenger's work could be associated with a single tool, it would not be a camera, but rather a fine, precise instrument of the forensic scientist, so diligent is the artist in dissecting the workings of an imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Most recently, she uses the images of Apollo torsos and Venus busts to continues her archaeology of the canons of beauty.
Photographic investigation became, by force of circumstance, the form that Rebecca Topakian adopted. In 2021, she set out to tell the personal story of her Armenian family, exiled from Turkey as a result of persecution. In the project Il faut que les braises de Constantinople s'envolent jusqu'en Europe, the artist continues recording, assembling and maintaining the embers of memory through photographs and text.
Rebekka Deubner's work is full of narratives of metamorphosis. From intimate exploration of the body and its movements in her early work, Deubner later moved on to exploring the body as political territory, with Les saisons thermiques - an ensemble dedicated to male contraception. Here, we find her slowly approaching the body and restoring its tender plasticity, an alternative representation of masculinity embodied.