An individual is merely the product of all his or her social experiences. ¹
Pierre Bourdieu

An apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. ²
Hal Foster

Delphine Balley (b. 1974, Romans-sur-Isère) has been working in her idiosyncratic style with still and moving images for twenty years. She has constructed her own inventory of beliefs to dramatise family atavisms and symbolic uses of place, from cradle to grave. She uses photography and film to explore the notion of representation by combining the gestural and the static, the formless and the fixed, the genuine and the fake.

Figures de cire is a corpus of three films–Charivari, Le Pays d'en haut and Le Temps de l'oiseau–sixteen photographic prints, and an early sculptural work. By marrying cinematographic (Méliès, Pasolini) and theatrical (Beckett, Artaud) references to a Rabelaisian style of rural iconography and the hermetic and genre-painting derived world of the family portrait, Delphine Balley, whose view camera requires long exposure time, paints the sociographic portrait of ubiquitous rigidity. Figures de cire is the tipping point between the artist's post-2002 figurative work, as expressed in the photographic series L'Album de famille, and her recent move towards formal and symbolic abstraction, in which the static state of the characters and objects becomes our own sojourn in the waiting-room of oblivion. ³

The Home as Locus of Identity Theatre

In Delphine Balley's work, the context of her scenes, in both photographs and film, is the domestic and the vernacular. The proprieties of family life provide an opportunity for her to share her interest in curative and popular rituals and her fascination for stories and symbolic paraphernalia of ritual such as eggs, feathers, wedding dresses, mourning dress, bouquets, and pillars, along with her interest in the various themes that arise from the representation of these ethoi –carnival, masquerade, pretence, disappearance, and death.

The hermetic nature of domestic space enables the artist to create a tightly framed encounter between family figures, objects and motifs. The images are composed on various planes evoking the timeframe of a story: the scenery, the placement of the characters, the lines arranged to create vanishing points. The artist is addressing the question of representation, where the setting plays a structural role: it establishes the rigidity of family laws that assign a fixed place to each person – an architecture of private life. In La Vie matérielle, Marguerite Duras describes the home as a projection of the body.⁴ Beyond its womb-like form, the home and what it contains (materially and symbolically) is the self in the making. By treating time as a fertile and protean factor, Delphine Balley gives an account of the awkwardness of positioning oneself socially. Whether she is talking about everyone or about herself as an artist, it is about finding "a room of one's own" in the home.⁵

Gestalt theory suggests that our perceptual system sets up processes that enable us to interpret objects or situations as an entire structure, thanks to our observation being organised independently of our will –as if the perception of things were self-organising. The objects in Delphine Balley's works are connected to religious or secular narratives. Most of them relate to meals and the customs associated with meals - their ritual or funerary aspects (the Egyptian ceremony of the open mouth, the Roman Pompa funebris, etc.). For both the living and the dead, eating is essential to the organism, but also to the community: its role is to fill the void left by the departure of the deceased. Foods are also the basis of still life in painting, which Diderot called "rested nature" (fruit, game, etc.).

The False and the Phoney

The protagonists in Delphine Balley's work are together but alone, each getting on with his or her own business. The psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott developed the concept of a “false self”, a necessary stage in adapting to society.⁶ This false self refers to a defensive behaviour of adaptation to a demanding situation created by the environment and obliging us to play a role. In other words, it is a reaction to an external fact – one of submission that thus protects an overly fragile true self. When the tension between the true and the false becomes too strong, the subject enters a process of self-destruction. In the true self, on the other hand, there is a stronger capacity for the use of symbols, which restores the balance between the true and the phoney. This adjusted self, whether on the internet or, as here, reproduced in the context of a social role, is the vocabulary of Delphine Balley's work.

In her recent photographs, Delphine Balley focuses on hyper-represented details. The notion of "hyperreality," –a combination of the words "hyper" from the Greek huper (meaning: above, beyond), and "reality" from the Latin realitas ("that which exists")–denotes "that which exists beyond reality, beyond what exists."⁷ Hyperreality characterises the way consciousness interacts with reality. In semiotics and philosophy, the term is used to describe a symptom of advanced postmodern culture. For semiologist Umberto Eco, it corresponds to a perfect copy of the original, or even to a more than perfect copy.⁸ These strategies of illusion allow us to see meaning where we might be tempted to see things, discourses that conceal other discourses –discourses that think they are saying one thing but mean another. The hyper-realistic representation of detail in Delphine Balley's work–which brings the setting and the object in her images into equal focus–allows her to break with pictorial codes depicting the social conventions of the modern Western world, in which it is becoming difficult to distinguish between what is alive and what is dead. The artist can then paint the universal, our human condition, which is one of mortality as well as resistance.

Wax has a predominant place in the artist's work. In her photographs and films, we find the material making reference to healing balm, to Joseph Beuys's anthroposophy, but also to mortuary practices (as a symbol of purity of intention, an object of offerings). Malleable and shapeless, wax symbolises obedience and control in Christian iconography. It is found in sculptures, covering bouquets, but also in a Contrepoids, equivalent to the weight and size of a human figure. A soft form made of wax evokes funerary customs and confronts the visitor with his or her own symbolic value.

The Habitus – Reproducing Social Structures

The works presented focus on the way in which context conditions all behaviour, in its choice of action as well as in its intention, whether in dissonance or in consensus with the group. The family characters depicted by Delphine Balley pose in the manner of early photography, when view cameras required long exposure times. Before that, it was painting that people had to pose for. Actually, a still life was even easier for the artist, since the subject did not move. The term habitus refers to socially ingrained habits, skills and dispositions, visible only through phenomenal manifestations, i.e. through an action performed in the world, or an event. The habitus derives from custom. It is the product of socialisation, and, for Pierre Bourdieu, also a lever for the reproduction of social structures.⁹ Being ingrained in the individual and his or her actions, it allows for the perpetuation of relations of domination in social space. By reversing the process, i.e. by immobilising animated scenes of ritual, Delphine Balley depicts symbolic immobility. Is there a place for choice–for free will–in the practice of customs? Might individual awareness of this inheritance interact structurally with our behaviour, make us free within the tradition? At the beginning of the 1970s, Pasolini evoked a society imbued with a "somatic and sartorial indifferentism", a mental and behavioural conformity "under the secular mask of false tolerance."¹⁰

In a recent study of the figure of Pulcinella and the painter Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Giorgio Agamben focuses on a representation of the “social machine” through Pulcinella as a masquerade in which each person plays his or her role more or less consciously.¹¹ Can the spectator of the farce be fully aware of what he or she is seeing? Can the viewer be part of the fun? "That language exists, that the world exists –this is what cannot be said, we can only laugh or cry about it (so it is not a mystical experience but an open secret –un segreto di Pulcinella)."¹²

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs of the dead marked the high point of mimesis, permanently frozen in time by the camera.¹³The photographs from the series L'Album de famille are a freezing of staged scenes and atavisms, as if they were still lifes. These family vanitases underpin a statement about the rigidity of the mores of the social structure: the requirement for posture to be maintained is demonstrated literally.

The Exhibition as Structure and Event

Figures de cire was conceived as a procession through time and abstraction, in which the visitor takes part. In this narrative, in which the ceremonies of marriage and burial merge, the use of trompe-l'oeil alludes to an ancient time when body and setting were conjoined. The exhibition attempts to duplicate this effect of place within place through a spatial device that interweaves worlds into one another. Thresholds are created by this mise en scène of the self, right down to the last. These combinations of different spaces are a materialisation of the inner worlds that Delphine Balley depicts, drawing on both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Surrealism. What is behind the curtain, behind the wallpaper? Through the dissemination of signs, which combine by means of intertextuality to form an invisible punctum, the exhibition offers an experience that unfolds both physically and psychologically as the visit proceeds.

The exhibition has been approached as a phenomenon –that is, something that appears and disappears, coming to inhabit the space at a particular moment. Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us that the world is not a collection of objects but of facts: phenomena with which we have an appointment. The architecture of the exhibition is therefore processional, using the space of the museum as a processive structure. It is punctuated by films, photographs and sculptures, by obligatory transitions –curtains and screens. In antiquity, such social, religious or pagan choreographies were where the group met and organised itself, along a physical, symbolic path. Taking up a position in a queue implies a consensus with the group and its destination. Walking, moving, becomes a form of choral quest, embodied by the unity of the group.

In his book Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman, an American Pragmatist philosopher, articulates his conception of the field of inquiry for which he coined the term 'somaesthetics'.¹⁴ The aim of this discipline is not only to reintroduce the body into a Western philosophical tradition that has essentially neglected and denigrated it. It also involves getting to the very heart of those philosophies which, in the twentieth century, have accorded a central place to the body in order to investigate its limits and to define new strategies for thinking and experiencing the individual body within an entirety. Following authors such as Dewey, James, and Merleau-Ponty, Richard Shusterman examines how, in the West, the way the organism is considered is insufficiently related to its well-being in space. The subjects addressed by Delphine Balley in her work look at the body, living and dead, in its deep connection with the environment which, furthermore, it seems to merge into.

Ruin

In Delphine Balley’s recent works, we have moved away from a representation of the body (individual, family) towards mortal remains, absence. The exhibition distils the ingredients of an open paradigm, constructed like a “Stations of the Cross”, in which visitors are confronted with their own abstraction. For although the exhibition toys with the notion of anthropological space, it is more specifically concerned with ruin.

A ruin is the remains of an edifice (both literally and figuratively), degraded by time or by human hands. "Going out of time into eternity," wrote Immanuel Kant.¹⁵ The contemporary ruin (as opposed to the ancient ruin, which is a bearer of history, affect and Romanticism –notably in paintings by Hubert Robert) manifests our need as a social body to understand the present and its obsolescence, materialised by the non-functionality and chaos of abandoned architecture. The ruin in Western painting symbolises decline and decay. It is the decay of progress giving way to nature and bringing about an aesthetic of renewal. It is also an allegory of the decomposed or dying body, either individual or collective. In 2020 and 2021, the world's social body stopped moving, locked down by a pandemic. An organism without movement, the organism of a thought without movement, has had to stop doing social things, to stop performing rituals. One finds oneself wondering: how can I occupy the space? What is my place within it, unless it is to be "beside myself"?

The Religious Aspect – Beliefs

In their essay The Dematerialization of Art, Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler built on the observation that art as an object is obsolete in order to demonstrate that dematerialisation was a new dynamic.¹⁶ In this void, the artist interpenetrates the surrounding world in a different way. By moving towards abstract compositions without bodies, Delphine Balley shows what is not visible. She moves from the image to the icon. The physicality that is absent in her latest compositions (which have new affiliations to the masters of classical painting –Caravaggio, de Chirico, or Zurbarán in the last diptych) is occupied by our own presence. Because of its mirror effect, Delphine Balley's work offers a singular experience, a negotiation with absence. Beliefs, unlike knowledge, allow us to not stay put. Playing on the principle of the appearance of images, Figures de cire envisages the visitor as a salient element in a set-up that goes beyond the exhibition: visitors are encountering works in which they recognise a part of themselves that may not have been formulated. Delphine Balley's compositions create situations conducive to a pathophanic reading of the world; they literally "stage" our last waltz –the waltz of the father in Le Temps de l’oiseau.¹⁷ And while we oscillate between observing or being observed in the course of the exhibition, we find ourselves involved in a pragmatic experiment: being part of the collapse. 

Our whole life is built on the principle of planned obsolescence, and to counter it we have to find the sharpest knife in the drawer. Figures de cire is an invitation to a meta-morphosis, to the loosening up of a rigid social organisation. The exhibition materialises the rubble of a society in decline at the dawn of a rebirth. Like a family portrait, it constructs our ability to take our place in a new setting, and to reinvent the sparkle of the world.