Valerie Belin at Brent Sikkema - New York - photography

French artist Valerie Belin produces large-scale, fine-grained black-and-white photographs, usually grouped around a common theme. During the developing process, she radically heightens the contrast between lights and darks, transforming her subjects into extraordinarily detailed patterns that extend over the picture plane. This abundance of surface articulation partially dissolves her figures and objects. For her first U.S. show, Belin exhibited 14 gelatin silver prints from five of these series, dating from 1997 to 2002.

The most visually startling images were two half-length portraits from her "Bodybuilders" series. These pumped-up strongmen show off the peaks and valleys of their anatomies, exaggerated by both their extreme physical condition and the intense lighting that reflected off their oiled-up, leathery hides. The fact that they are middle-aged men--the lines on their faces as chiseled as their biceps, triceps and pectorals--adds to the curiosity the images elicit. Meanwhile, the blank background against which they posed enhances the hyper-real effect, which cast these men not as mere mortals, but as metallic Greek gods.

While the medium is identical, the effects are wholly different in the four enormous head portraits from Belin's "Black Women" series. The pure, supersaturated blacks of their Senegalese skin produces exquisite silhouettes, set off by the equally amplified whites of their eyeballs and the backdrop behind them. Smooth, sleek, and streamlined like a Brancusi, these faces were in many ways the high points of the show.

Less successful were the two images of car crashes and the three of Venetian crystal-framed mirrors. The former are visually inert, despite the violent destruction they depict; the latter are a bit facile, overly literal manifestations of Belin's play with light, reflection and transparency.

Overall, though, Belin achieves an intriguing balance between abstraction and representation in her photographs, which invite prolonged viewing from multiple distances and angles. One of the most remarkable images in this respect is that of a Moroccan woman dressed in a traditional trapezoidal bridal costume, which covered her entire body, hiding its natural contours. The intense, complex patterning flattens the image so that the figure looks more like a Persian rug than a human form. The face is nearly lost, as the entire work oscillates between two and three dimensions. This phenomenon occurs with varying degrees in all the pieces shown. They dazzle the eye with sumptuous surfaces whose allure includes their capacity to confound.

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