FLATLAND at Art Rotterdam 2022
January 3, 2022
As with previous editions, Art Rotterdam 2022 will take place in the Van Nelle Fabriek in Rotterdam. After the summer edition in 2021, the event is back at its usual time from the 10th till the 13th of February.
FLATLAND will proudly present the works of two of the most renowned artists in Europe; Paolo Ventura and Valérie Belin.
Ventura is making a tribute to one of the greatest photographers Man Ray (1890 – 1976). Using his usual comical tone (reminiscent of comedia dell’arte) worked on Man Ray’s study Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Man Ray’s ‚Larmes’ (1932 appr.), one of the most celebrated works by Man Ray in which the model is crying glass tears, as an emotive expression of a silent screen star in a film still.
As Man Ray’s name resonates with his pioneering experimental photographic techniques, it is no coincidence Paolo Ventura pays tribute to Man Ray as Ventura’s stunning absurdist work proves to search for a similar inventive and personal language of photography. Experiments with paint on photographs, cut-outs of paper, building maquettes and backdrops are just a few of the artistic measurements used by Ventura to weave an unspecified, ambiguous atmosphere in his work.
Just as Man Ray, Paolo Ventura enjoys the envious creative relationships with Vogue. A green gem on a pale true skin will be one of the highlights of the fair.
From Valérie Belin (1964, Boulogne-Billancourt), one of the most celebrated French
photographers of today, FLATLAND is proud to continue presenting her work in The Netherlands. Working closely with the esteemed gallery Nathalie Obadia in Paris and Brussels, FLATLAND brings
some meticulously crafted imagery of Valérie Belin to Rotterdam.
As Clément Chéroux, the newly appointed Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York stated when he was Chief Curator of Photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, “…Through her (Belin, ed.) effects of motion blur, the artist alters the model. She places the image at a distance, and thus brings forth the false, vain, grotesque or morbid aspects it can contain. It is precisely that which disturbs…Hence, we arrive at what constitutes the terrain of Valérie Belin’s experiments and the world of
her artistic ideas: light, matter and the “body” of things and beings in general, as well as their
transformations and representations.”
Paolo Ventura, LongRead, Vogue Italia, 2019, Hand painted photography, 62 x 40 cm