Theatre of the mind
Written by Valérie Sourdieux, 2012

What escapes your sight can be found in another kind of reality.

Since she created L'album de Famille, Delphine Balley has examined all sorts of rooms, inhabited rooms. Then she started opening the door to inaccessible, secret spaces where the intimate is hidden and protected. What we are offered to see are the traces of a presence. We are invited to discover deserted rooms, representative of a mental state which makes up a theatre of the imaginary and the unknown.
Like the walls of the photograph called Loirs in which the wall- paper has been ripped off, reality is made of layers which constitute fiction and offer a new interpretation of what the eye can see. What precisely concerns the photographer is this elusive part which can't be deciphered by usual codes.
Like objects and human beings, places change and this difference reveals the existence of a tangible and autonomous universe. Despite this break from reality, the flow of time continues offscreen, symbolic of what one finds in the photograph Sel where a waterclock would have been emptied on the floor. Our perception disturbed by the lack of the usual landmarks forces the mind to compose a story and continue the transformation. This is actually what Delphine Balley offers us, reclaiming images, the weft of which, erased and mysterious, creates the theatre of the mind.