White Balance - Barbara Wille

Mon, 14 Apr 2014 16:30

On view
14 Apr-11 May 2014

White Balance - Barbara Wille

White balance is what you set in the camera, so that a white wall in a photo actually appears white. Usually that does happen. The white wall takes in whatever exists around it: the weather, a red sweater, a yellow-painted wall across the street.

The white wall is a convention of display and as such an essential motif in Barbara Wille's photographic inlays. Photographs of the white wall are combined with the heavily-grained surface of wood from a pallet which is set into the image. There, it occupies the place of previously photographed models. The gesture of exhibiting is thus already anticipated as motif. Depending on the light and the materiality of the models, and depending on what else is in the room, the wall may appear on the photographs as an atmospheric, lively-textured white, on which the models throw multiform shadows in differentiated colour. Everything is incl uded in these shadows, which thus reflect the room and its objects. Hence Barbara Wille's photographic inlays already originate in part from the sphere of the image. By combining photographic surfaces with real objects, a tautological construct creates the perception of hyperrealism: the wood of the pallet appears very sharp and brilliantly portrayed. The difference in scale and the relationship between the light in the image and in the room opens up surprising perspectives on the plasticity of what is seemingly portrayed. The thing becomes what it shows: a wall-mounted, pallet-like construction. And although one sees immediately through the nature of the work, one desires deception. A photographic tromp l'oeil.