Hellen van Meene at Matthew Marks - New York - Brief Article

Hellen van Meene's photographic portraits seem to be documentary, providing a window onto her vulnerable subjects' solitary desires and despairs. However, the images, always of adolescent females, are actually staged. For the most part, the girls are posed in a manner that makes them seem as if they carry concerns and yearnings beyond their years. They tend to show a fair bit of skin. They rarely look at the camera. Eyes are usually downcast, focused elsewhere. In the past, van Meene's models have been European. Here, they're Japanese. But, judging from van Meene's oeuvre, one might safely surmise that she regards the adolescent female's ennui as transcending nationality.

Van Meene's camera tends to linger on eccentric but captivating details. She wraps a set of identical twins in translucent pink plastic, for instance. It drapes geometrically, clashing beautifully with the natural world. She highlights slightly pimply skin, bags under eyes and flesh taut with baby fat. The anti-ideal is both a little perverted and appealing. She's drawn to windows, to the way they make vague reflections of her melancholy muses, heightening their ethereal demeanors. Van Meene's underage subjects appear to feel a little strung out, but don't let it get in the way of their precocious emotional voraciousness.

A plump, pigtailed teen in a tartan miniskirt and sports shirt smashes the back of her body strangely against a window, cocking her hip to the side. A young girl lies on her belly, ass and legs propped up on a bed. Her face is on the floor. She coyly gazes into the camera, fingering one of her lips. The persona of the photographer, who goes through the world kinkily observing and chronicling young Asian girls, hazily indulging in the tactile and the colorful, gets passed on to the viewer of the photographs. It's not unpleasant, but it is a bit unnerving. "Are they prostitutes?" a fellow gallery-goer asked aloud.

Van Meene's work isn't totally unlike that of the late fashion photographer Guy Bourdin. But it is markedly less demeaning than his often sadistic images of young girls in too much makeup striking compromising poses. Van Meene's empathy for her subjects shines through. Her girls are more sensual and individualized; their volition stays intact, and their aching remains their own. My favorite photograph, however, is the least sexually charged in the show. It's a headshot of a young woman with her eyes closed. Her face is slightly square. Blossoms on a tree behind her match her fuzzy white jacket, which is buttoned to the top. Setting off the image's overall pallor, long, raven-colored hair hangs over her shoulders while the tree's branches echo a dark sinewy tangle against a pristine blue sky. She seems to be floating off into a pastel-hued ecstasy, tasting the narcotic disbelief that a moment can be simultaneously so exquisite and so impermanent.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group