Alain Delorme

ALAIN DELORME

DAYS OF OUR LIVES

ALAIN DELORME

DAYS OF OUR LIVES

Between tears and laughs Inspired by, or, more truthfully, revolted by, the imagery of the modern media, French photographer Alain Delorme has created a series of digitally manipulated photographs featuring the smiling faces of barbie-tized little girls. His manipulations, making their mouths and eyes larger, faces more made-up, make clear his message that the representations of women in the media are delivering this unnatural image to little girls looking for idols to worship, models as role-models. In each photo there is the presence of an adult>s hand correcting, readjusting, forcing the child to react and appear in a way that is and should be completely alien to them; forcing a doll-like image of women onto girls too young to know better. His bright compositions and cheerful settings drive home the irony of each picture.

It>s astonishing to see something at once so colorful and light and at the same time so dark and sinister.

Forword Jordi Gourbeix

Alain Delorme is a young French artist from the generation of photographers such as the couple Aziz+Cucher or Inez Van Lamsweerde, who use the computing tool for the ends of mutation and hybridization of bodies. His oeuvre is a caustic criticism of the use of children>s images, in particular of little girls, submitted to the advertising diktat making them objects of consumption useful to the laws of the market. Inspired by the advertising aesthetic, the series Little Dolls, takes an ironic and worrying look at the identification by young girls with western female stereotypes, such as the Barbie doll, which over the last 60 years has become its commercial icon. Incarnation of the fantasies of contemporary consumer society, a mediatized toy sold across the planet, Barbie is today the biggestselling doll in the world, and consequently, one of the main objects of identity projection for little girls.

In the United States the «Miss Beauty Children» beauty contests for children and adolescents mirror this phenomenon. During a grand mediatized ceremony, supported or constrained by their mothers, young girls or very young girls walk on stage, made-up, with hair styled like dolls, adopting outfits, dresses, gestures and traits like dolls.The «Barbie model» Contemporary photography, by increasingly accepting the possibilities of transformation of the real by new technologies, is for this, the best medium to reproduce, describe and therefore to denounce this situation.

In Alain Delorme s images the mix of innocent youth and commercial object, denounces the standardization and subjection of bodies, smiles, looks.Smooth skin, smiles and forced attitudes, are constrained by an ever-present hand. At once little girls, women and dolls, the Little Dolls show a possible worrying future where the child, at the cost of plastic transformations, risks to become a simple object, amenable and transformable at will.

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Angèle Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls- Astenza Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls -Cassandre Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Emma Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Hanna Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Morgane Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Nell Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Sarah Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Sophie Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Lilou Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Anna Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Envencia Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Romane Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Roxane Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Elodie Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Lea Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Celia Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Milla Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Anissa Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Little Dolls - Lea - Tara - Roxane Photography 50x33 cm, 70x45 cm 2007 Edition /82+AP

Alain Delorme Totems Photography 60X90 cm, 80x120 cm 201012Edition /82+AP

It takes three wheels and the full power of one man to get the consumer dream rolling. This man comes from a place where bikes glide Iightly between rice fields. He is one of those migrants who discover, full force, the gray strips of asphalt, the Shanghai skyscrapers and the capitalist totems made of bottles, boxes, tires and crates. The man sags under his pile, but continues pedaling along, maintaining a tenuous equilibrium. With each turn of the wheel, he rattles the ”great factory of the world," and can aspire to his share of this unbelievable « piece montée ». The man is at the bottom of the image, on the lowest rung of the social ladder, but he just may one day reach the top. For Alain Delorme, this series is about finding our way between the absurdity of the materialist world and mankind's age-old dream of reaching for something higher. While keeping the Wheel turning" "Il faut trois roues et toute la force motrice de l'homme pour mettre en branle le rêve consumériste. L'homme est un petit porteur de Shanghai. Il vient d'ailleurs, de ces chemins de terre ocre où le vélo file, léger, entre les rizières. Il est de ces migrants qui découvrent simultanément le ruban gris du bitume, les gratte-ciel de Shanghai qui lui font d'étranges épaulettes et les totems capitalistes faits de bouteilles, de cartons, de pneus et de cageots.

L'homme ploie sous ces amoncellements mais il pédale tout de même, maintient sa trajectoire équilibriste. A chaque tour de roue, il fait vibrer la "grande usine du monde" et peut prétendre à une part de cette invraisemblable pièce montée. L'homme est à ras de l'image, au bas de l'échelle sociale. Rien ne dit qu'il ne sera pas un jour au sommet des édifices nouveaux de la mégalopole. Avec cette série aux couleurs acidulées, Alain Delorme ne dit rien d'autre. Entre l'absurdité du monde matérialiste et le rêve immuable et ascensionnel de l'homme, il faut trouver la juste voie. Et faire tourner la roue.

Natacha Wolinski – art critic

A young man drags a ramshackle stack of furniture across a city on a makeshift cart; another pedals a colossal tower of cardboard boxes along the road, the load perched precariously above his tricycle. «The dizzying heights of these piles echo the incessant expansion of the buildings in the background,» explains the French photographer Alain Delorme, who spent several weeks last year documenting the frenetic activity of China>s most populous city, Shanghai.

These towering loads – or «totems», as Delorme calls them – are symbols of both a bustling boomtown and a reminder that the country>s economic leaps forward have depended on the hard graft of an army of workers. At first glance, these workers are the Herculean heroes of this brave new world, able to balance and heave huge loads. But linger longer and Delorme>s images take on a different dimension. «After a while I had the feeling that the objects they carried swallowed them,» he reveals. These pictures aren>t an ode to consumerism, then, but a reflection of our slavish clamouring for endless piles of goods.

Look closer still, and the loads seem to teeter at crazy angles, defying gravity. The piles have, in fact, been digitally exaggerated to question their role in the world>s fastestgrowing economy. «I wanted to show how small, traditional jobs in Shanghai life may soon disappear,» explains Delorme – replaced, that is, by gleaming transport trucks bought by a city in hot pursuit of modernity.

Adam Jacques – art critic

Take a look at one of Alain Delorme>s pictures of migrant workers toting massive piles of things around Shanghai, and I guarantee you>ll do a double-take, or at least stare dumbly for a minute trying to figure out what the heck is going on. What in the what? Is that even possible?

Turns out, Paris-based Delorme creates these spectacular towers of boxes, tires and blankets using Photoshop. As he exaggerates reality by meticulously stitching together the image, he tries to confuse the line between what is fake and what is real, asend raise questions around the limits and rules of documentary photography.

«Even pictures covering a story are retouched to look cleaner, more beautiful,» he writes in an e-mail. «What are the limits when the search for perfect aesthetics hides a part of reality?»

Delorme uses only candid photos of people and buildings around Shanghai to construct his images, but exaggerates the loads to draw attention to them. By juxtaposing the towering piles of stuff with the towering buildings in the distance, Delorme writes, «I wanted both to restitute the feeling of accumulation and the vertigo I felt when I first arrived in Shanghai — as well as the strong contrast between modern and traditional China.»

He calls this series Totems Mito Habe-Evans – art critic

Totem - Making Of

Totem - Making Of

Totem - Making Of

Alain Delorme Photographs of Bike Deliverymen Captures the Old-New of Shanghai Photographer Alain Delorme documents the Shanghai deliverymen who marry the ancient cart and the demands of modern commerce in a balancing act that has to be seen to be believed.

The mind wants to make metaphor out of photographer Alain Delorme’s images of modern Shanghai. It’s Sisyphus on a bike. It’s the weight of capitalist struggle on the back of the worker. It’s a rolling example of human ingenuity. Oh, wait.

It really is that last thing. Why get fanciful or poetic when you can simply look at these photographs and tip your hat to the sheer pluck, ingenuity, and determination that it took the people in these pictures to transport goods from point A to point B? Carts, trikes, bikes—the most humble forms of transportation this side of a mule, set against the high-rise wonder of the modern metropolis: yes, the disparity practically screams off the page. But what sticks with you is the clowns-in-a-Volkswagen lunacy of the wide loads in a tiny space—it’s comical, it’s heartbreaking, it’s impressive, all at once. It makes you think of William Faulkner’s argument that man will not merely endure, he will prevail.

Looking at these images, who could doubt that?

Malcolm Jones – Newsweek art columnist

Biography Born in 1979. Lives and works in Paris, France.

Graduated from the Gobelins Image School (Paris), photography departmen.

Master in Photography technics and Sciences, Paris VIII University.

Main solo shows 2012 Magda Danysz Gallery, Shanghai, China.

2012 Galerie Bacqueville, Lille, France.

2012 FTC Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

2011 L'imprimerie Image/Imatge, Orthez, France.

2011 Salle Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain.

2011 Galerie Brandt, Amsterdam, Hollande.

2011 Le Bon Marché / Rive Gauche, Paris, France.

2010 Galerie Magda Danysz, Paris, France.

2008 Galerie 360°, Tokyo, Japan.

2007 Galerie Cosmos , Paris, France.

2006 L'imprimerie Image/Imatge, Orthez, France.

Main group shows 2012 Vevey Image Festival, Vevey, Switzerland.

2012 "Overlook", Magda Danysz Gallery, Shanghai, China.

2012 "Free Ride Art Space", BWA gallery, Wroclaw Poland.

2011 "Paris Forever", galerie Magda Danysz, Paris, France.

2011 Mapamundistas, Pampelune, Spain.

2011 Galerie Le Lieu, Lorient, France.

2011 Galerie Photo 12/ Valérie-Anne Giscard d'Estaing, Paris, France.

2011 20ème mois de l'Image, Dieppe, France.

2011 Galerie de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Nancy, France.

2011 Kyungpook National University Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea.

2010 10 ans du Prix Arcimboldo, L'imagerie de Lannion, France.

2009 Festival International de Photographie, Séoul, South Korea.

2009 Atelier Brognard, Rueil-Malmaison, France.

2009 Arthotèque de Pessac, Les Arts au mur, Pessac, France.

2009 Jeune Collection II, galerie Couteron, Paris, France.

2009 Musée du Montparnasse, Paris, France.

2008 ”The Drawing Hand”, galerie Magda Danysz, Paris, France.

2008 21e Rencontres Photographiques de Solignac, Limoges, France.

2008 9e Transphotographiques, Tri Postal, Lille, France.

2007 29e Estivales Photographiques du Trégor, l'imagerie de Lannion, France.

2007 Voies Off, Arles, France.

2007 “Play”, galerie Magda Danysz, Paris, France.

2006 Tongli Young Photography Festival, Tongli, China.

2005 Centre Culturel Jean-Houdremont , La Courneuve, France.

2004 Boltanski Gallery, Blanc-Mesnil Cultural Center, France.

2003 Résonances industrielles, L'Usine, Plaine Saint-Denis, France.

Residency programs and awards 2010 The Ailing Foundation, Shanghai, China.

2009 The Ailing Foundation, Shanghai, China.

2007 Prix Arcimboldo, Gens d'Image, Paris, France.

All Rights Reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher.

Printed in the PRC. Published by : MD Editions

Alain Delorme -Days of our Lives is a limited edition catalogue published by Magda Danysz Gallery (Paris / Shanghai) MD Editions on the occasion of Alain Delorme’s Solo show in Shanghai from October 20th, 2012 to December 1st, 2012 info@magda-gallery.com