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My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York tan this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night. (…) In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. (…) Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952
This extract may make some of you think of one of the large and detailed photographs by the famous Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946) displayed at MoMA. One even could say that these words describe the scene of that man seated from the rear, drying the flatware with lifeless gaze in a room packed to the roof and illuminated by hundreds of bulbs. However, if we were standing in front of the large silver dye bleach transparency under the aluminum light box of the MoMA, and if we read the title of the photograph, we would see that the photography’s title is After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, The Prologue.
So it is not the image that precedes the text, but the opposite. The admirable Wall, with his meticulous design and staging, created a dramatized image of how exactly he figured the scene described by Ellison in the prologue of his novel. We see the protagonist in his “hole in the basement” of the Harlem suburb, lost in thought and thinking in his invisibility, listening to his gramophone playing Louis Armstrong’s “What did I do to be so black and blue?” and with 1369 bulbs over his head. Is 1369 the exact number? I bet no one has ever been counting them as it it assumed that the precise Wall made sure that the final cut was correct.
I started talking about the Canadian photographer and in particular about this photography narrator of the prologue of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as its construction of the scene, its artifice, stage sense, and, especially, the baroque of concept and form of the image, unavoidably come to my mind when looking at the artwork of Aurore Valade (Villeneuve-sur-Lot, France, 1981).
Likewise, the French photographer chooses, designs and recreates the stages of her images, which she digitally edits afterwards. She asks her protagonists not simply to pose but to behave as actors to get attitudes and expressions which brings that authenticity and theatricality that make them to look cinematographic stills
Allegories of the excess
AURORE VALADE
CURATED BY LAURA JIMÉNEZ IZQUIERDO
Biography:
Aurore Valade (Villeneuve-sur-Lote, France, 1981) is graduated by the Fine Arts School of Bordeaux and by the National Superior School of Photography of Arles. She has been member of the Casa Velázquez – Académie de France in Madrid during 2015 and 2016. She got several awards like the Fondation HSBC pour la photographie award in 2008, the Quinzaine photographique nantaise award in 2006, or the Arca Swiss in 2005. Her work is represented by the gallery Stieglitz19 in Anvers, Gagliardi e Domke in Turin and she is member of the Agence photo Picturetank of Paris.
She creates images that play with the iconic register of scenography. In these elaborate stagings, we are often confronted with clichés, meaningful reflections of a social, economic or cultural situation in contemporary life.
To get all the composition and draft the script of her own movie, it seems that Valade took her inspiration from Piero della Francesca’s De prospectiva pingendi treaty. All her interiors are framed with a perfect linear projection and the same central vanishing point as of the Italian artist’s paintings.
In fact, in her Rittrati Torino series, she adopts for the portraits of her models the same pattern than the Italian painter in his Dyptich of the Dukes of Urbino: a sober profile and lifeless look ahead. Each profile stands in a white canvas which preserves it from the ornament saturation and colors of the room. They presents in a pure and plain hideout where the naturalness of the model is depicted.
But where is the real portrait? Within the limits of the canvas framing the naked and natural model? Or is it rather in the model’s surroundings? The artist slips through the intimacy of her portrayed models, studying their daily nature and personal life, taking a position on Ortega and Gasset’s debate to decide whether “one is one and his circumstances”.
Indeed, in Valade’s photos, the personality of the model is captured through the excess of ornaments. The clothes, the furniture and objects flung in every direction reveal the model’s way of dressing, if she has children or pets, if her taste is rather minimalist or classical and baroque, which books and which type of press she reads, if she likes art or if she prefers Paris Hilton’s TV show.
With all this game of staging and drama, of colors and forms, of perspectives and framings, with all this aesthetic of saturation and meticulousness, of overflowing but exact adds, Aurore Valade figures her own mises en scenes of our daily environment. And if someone feels saturated by the level of detail, by the abuse of color, or by the 1369 bulbs of the photograph of Wall, he/she should look around and ask him/herself whether he/she does not live surrounded by a similar superabundance of excesses.
Laura Jiménez Izquierdo
October 2016
Aurore Valade presents an iconography of our social, economic and cultural situation, just like Jan van Eyck and the Flemish painters of the 15th century used to saturate the interiors of their scenes with iconography that alluded to the depicted models.
I choose to say “our” instead of “of the models” as despite the supposed singularity and originality of the lives that she depicts, the majority of us could identify with the visual personality those interiors reflect. In the end, they are common, ordinary. All of them share that theatralized, saturated and kitsch detail. An allegory of the excess of our time, of the exiguous distance between the private and the public.
It is one aesthetic of the postmodern, of satiety and detail. It is a complexity in which the spectator first loses himself in the details, then starts looking for something he can identify with or tries to discover what is real and what is added with Photoshop.
Aurore Valade plays with this baroque saturation in other photographic series. In Interiores mexicanos, the artist even brings the concept to the next level by gathering all the color and iconography of the Mexican culture in a few square meters: clothing and tapestries, wrestling and traditional dance masks, exotic fruits and, of course, many, many color.
Without never forgetting that Italian perspective “Francesca” and its central vanishing point, the photographer go from the excessive to the minimal and simple. In her series L’or gris she left all the saturation and stuff of the other series and she focuses in the purest. In clean, illuminated rooms with white walls she photographs her portrayed models in the dramatic height of her stage play, which could reminds us to the Tragedia Endogodinia of Romeo Castelluci.
Between cross vaults, marble furniture, slightly pointed arches and capitals or in a completely empty room with only a large window, a wood door and a sculpture, they appear 2 elders joined each other. Turning the tables to the stereotyped image of the passive and depressed elder, we can see here a frozen ecstasy of love of two bodies which, although with many years behind them, they love intensely the same.
In the same series, Valade plays with the history of art and classical iconography. Continuing with her white rooms, she depicts a ruined room and in the center a modern Caritas romana, with a black skin Pero breastfeeding secretly who could be her father Cimon, alert just in case that someone come and see them. She also updates other scenes like the Old man with his grandson of Ghirlandaio, where the gazes of affection between the grandfather and his grandson are the same than in the canvas of the ending of the 15th century, but the clothes and the city of the background correspond to our time.
