If there were one tool to associate with Hélène Bellenger’s work, it would not be a camera but one of those delicate, precise instruments used by a forensic scientist, such is the artist’s dedication throughout her work to dissecting the mechanisms behind imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Preferring the act of collecting and transforming to that of taking photographs, she engages with inert, obsolete images. For Dazzled project, she gathers from the internet a collection of faces obliterated by a flash—now a famous form of the mirrored flash selfie—forming a sort of digital sun that contaminates the image and prevents the portrait. Another collection consists of advertisements for anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants from specialized journals, which she assembles into a frieze to display the litany of tense faces and slogans in the form of injunctions to happiness. Earlier, in *Right Color*, she repurposes a collection of magazines, posters, and photograms from film reels dating from the 1920s to the 1950s featuring actresses, reviving the makeup applied to them to reconstruct their faces and alter their features for the black-and-white screen of the era. With her recent Bianco ordinario, featuring Apollonian torsos and Venus busts, she continues her exploration of beauty standards. Through a play on overlapping forms and materials, she connects the geological history of the Carrara marble quarries—from its extraction in ancient times for sculpture to the massive contemporary extraction of marble powder used, in particular, to whiten the packaging of our cosmetics and cleaning products. The series features a collection of unfolded cardboard boxes onto which the artist prints images of ancient busts and quarry landscapes. These images will, in turn, be stripped from their surface by the acidity of the marble powder contained in the cardboard, washing them “whiter than white.” The history and fate of the Western concept of whiteness are at the heart of the work the artist is currently developing in the Mediterranean basin.
Hélène Bellenger (b. 1989) lives and works between Marseille and Paris. After studying law and art history, she specialized in photography and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles in 2016.
Bianco Ordinario was supported by the 2021 Creation Grant from the Drac PACA and produced at the Centre Photographique Île-de-France as part of the 2022–2023 research and post-production residency.
The artist would like to thank Isabelle Carta, Roland Carta, the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, Nathalie Giraudeau, the Marguerite Milin Gallery, and Francesco Biasi.
