Aurore Valade builds her photographs around her models’ stories and tales. She stages their daily lives, hence questioning our ways of life and our private spaces. The photographs in this exhibition are constructed according to three classical painting genres: the portrait, interior scenes and vedute. Each composition is the fruit of a meticulous labour of photomontage and retouching. But, despite these technical interventions and redefinitions, the photographs retain a realistic power and remain faithful to the truth of the actual moment when they were taken. Valade’s work refers to an essay by the German poet and critic Rainer Maria Rilke called Notes on the Melody of Things (1898), in which he reflects upon the theme of the portrait in works of art. In Rilke’s writings, the view of the background is similar to a melody, in which each character is part of a choir, each person’s voice contributing to create the harmony of the whole. According to the poet, it is not—therefore—the faithful reproduction of a character that creates the possibility of a relationship. What is instead more important is the representation and the understanding of the ‘world’ in which the subject lives, the world hidden behind the figure. A space which, in the works presented in Arles, is presented like an interior loaded with objects and memories, a space which opens on the perspective view of the town or on the shared and globalised world spoken about in the media—newspapers, television—present in these photographs.

Maria Cristina Strati