LYON.- The Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon is hosting Delphine Balley’s first institutional solo exhibition. Born in 1974 in Roman-sur-Isère, Delphine Balley has pursued her own distinctive style of photography and video-image making for twenty years.

Figures de cire is a journey through time and the vernacular, structured around three films – Charivari, Le Pays d’en haut and Le Temps de l’oiseau –, fifteen photographs, and a new sculptural work. Through a study of rites of passage, the artist probes depictions and dysfunctions on the social stage. The exhibition is constructed as a narrative with gaps, in which the family portrait, genre painting, still-lifes and the iconography of ruin and the body – the body physical and the body social – all come together.

By constructing her own inventory of beliefs, Delphine Balley dramatises social atavisms and symbolic uses of place, from cradle to grave. Domestic space is omnipresent in her work; it allows her to conceive the image at different levels, thus reflecting the passage of time in a narrative. The décor, both in the films and in her photographic work, has a structural role. It is an architecture of intimacy that encloses the rigidity of family space and conveys, quite literally, how uncomfortable it is to take up a position. In the photographs, the reification of the bodies corresponds to the exposure time required by the camera. Which leads to a convergence of the moving and the still, of formlessness and stability, the real and the fake. From the figurative compositions she developed in 2002 in the series L’Album de famille, in which trompe-l’œil settings, figures, and accumulated objects interact with each other, right up to her recent pieces, Figures de cire marks a shift towards new forms. These associations are fuelled by themes of pretence, metamorphosis and disappearance, drawing on both psychoanalysis and Surrealism to give tangible form to our inner worlds.

Set against artefacts from funeral customs (such as a wax counterweight that confronts the visitor with his own symbolic value), the large format prints, reminiscent of religious painting, become pared-down vanitas works, disembodied, metaphysical representations of our own perishability.

How can we participate in society nowadays, when we have to practise social distancing from one another? A ruin, an allegory for the decomposed body, also suggests the erosion of a damaged social world. Illusion and reality overlap in Delphine Balley’s work to evoke the conformism of social postures. As Foucault says in Of Other Spaces, “the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another.” The exhibition is built on the model of a procession scene – religious or pagan –, in which we can participate by wandering through the symbolic architecture of the museum.

Figures de cire narrates the cycle of life – that which is not made visible. The exhibition provides a temporary stage for our human condition, our ability to take our place in a setting for living together. And it gives substance to the way in which, like wax figures, we strive to overcome the indifference of time.

--Agnès Violeau, curator

A catalog has been published, bilingual French/English, rich in exhibition views and with texts by Agnès Violeau, Chantal Pontbriand, curator and Canadian art critic, as well as an interview by the artist with Melanie Pocock, curator at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

Conceived as an extension of the exhibition, it will constitute a reference on the work of Delphine Balley.