25, quai Voltaire – 75007 Paris
01 42 60 36 47
www.helenebailly.com

Manon Bellet

7-22 November

“The work of Manon Bellet is a dénouement. Her images are not simply the result of framing and pressing the button, but a sum of complex actions with a slow development time.

We only have access through legend to the preparation of the chemical coatings, repeated exposure to the sun, unsticking, or affixing a heat source.

In the “radiant Toxicity” series, Manon Bellet perceivesthe image: once the photograph is taken, the artist forgets the sun. First threat: the light that caused the image is now altered and dissolved.

Then the artist unsticks the positive from the negative, full of chemistry, and only keeps that to show us a memory of an unmade image.

Impossible to fix perfectly, these works are transformed. Like the light rays and chemicals, a condition for the appearance of the photograph, there is now the threat of annihilation. Once exposed, this work is altered.

These are photographs of the remnant, mobile revelations of a reality which has withdrawn. Yet sometimes we think we can recognize something among the black remains and liquid leftovers.

Manon Bellet questions photography: she grabs processes as different as cyanotype or polaroid, or transposes their principles.

When it is not the light that makes an impression on a sensitive surface, it is a heat source that darkens fax paper rolls as in the Imagery of Chance. There then appear random, diffuse landscapes.

The work of Manon Bellet goes from figuration of the world and shows the visible only after a subtraction.”

Hélène Giannecchini, 2015, published in the online magazine of the Jeu de Paume.