FIAC: Paris

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Jill Conner

International Contemporary Art Fair

Paris Expo

Porte de Versailles

October 9-13, 2003

The 30th annual FIAC exposition that opened in Paris on October 9th for four days presented a visual history of European and American Modernism which served to contextualize the contemporary art on view. Although this fair marked a return to abstraction, a wide range of photography that touched upon personal experience, autobiographical introspection, documentary fiction and urban environments was also exhibited. Despite the fact that these categories are Postmodernist in nature, the photographs selected for exhibition captured particular visual elements, germane to the esprit du jour, renewing the practice of photography as a legitimate art form.

The use of the photographic portrait to assert individual presence appears in Celine Van Balen's work which captures the mystery of being while each sitter is depicted in an isolated manner, entirely removed from any kind of thematic environment. The first-name titles given to each piece paradoxically suggests both anonymity and individual identity even though the artist's method of combining a casual title with an image allows her work to be widely accessible. Van Balen's subtle use of color and focal isolation toys with Postmodernism's thirst for information, needed to write the present and re-write the past. However when considering her use of black and white film to create similar representations of African subjects, it could be suggested that Van Balen utilized the photographic medium as a response to the ongoing existence of racial difference.

LawickMuller's six-panel piece titled, "Perfectly Super Natural: Aphrodite or Arles, Anne, Simone, Anna, Isabelle, Andrea, Nina" (2002) features an exploration of the formal limits surrounding the portrait style. While the title contains more names than panels, each sitter differs slightly in appearance. Each face, moreover, was digitally enhanced by the artist to look like the Venus de Milo although set within different modes of vanity such as a frizzy, permed hair style or pierced ears and nose. Muller's attempt to appropriate a very recognizable element of art history within the context of the present transforms his work into historical romanticism.

The meaning of a 8-panel portrait piece by Zhang Huan titled "Family Tree", however, exists at the intersection of fiction, history and the current day. By using the individual face as a surface upon which another applies painted Chinese calligraphy, Huan metaphorically references to China's control over both linguistic and visual forms of expression. As the sitter's face gradually disappears beneath the surface black ink, this work obviously serves as a testament to the longings of those who live within a society that opposes individual identity.

While portraiture was by far not the only genre of photography exhibited, the attempts made by Van Balen, Muller and Huan deserve recognition since they dare to engage in a methodology that finds itself quite frequently near aesthetic and intellectual exhaustion. Although the meaning of portraits usually result from a relationship of the figure to its surroundings, these images abstract the individual and challenge the viewer to develop meaning through a self-constructed dialectic independent of the image.