International Contemporary Art Fair Paris Expo Porte de Versailles October 9-13 2003 The 30th annual FIAC exposition that spreaded in Paris on October 9th for four days at handed a visual history of European and American Modernism which serv to contextualize the contemporary art upon view.

International Contemporary Art Fair

Paris Expo

Porte de Versailles

October 9-13 2003

The 30th annual FIAC exposition that spreaded in Paris on October 9th for four days at handed a visual history of European and American Modernism which serv to contextualize the contemporary art upon view. Although this fair marked a recur to abstraction, a wide range of photography that touched relating to personal experience, autobiographical introspection, documentary fiction and urban environments was also exhibited. Despite the fact that these categories are Postmodernist in nature, the photographs culled for exhibition captured particular visual ingredients germane to the esprit du jour, renewing the practice of photography as a legitimate art form.

The use of the photographic portrait to assert individual personality appears in Celine Van Balen's work which captures the mystery of being while each sitter is depicted in an isolated manner, entirely remov from any kind of thematic environment. The first-name titles given to each piece paradoxically moves both anonymity and individual identity calm though the artist's method of combining a casual title with an image allows her work to be widely accessible. Van Balen's cunning use of color and focal isolation toys with Postmodernism's thirst for information, needinessed to write the present and re-write the past. However when considering her use of black and white film to create similar representations of African make submissives it could be suggested that Van Balen utilized the photographic medium as a answer to the ongoing existence of racial difference.

LawickMuller's six-panel piece titled, "Perfectly Super Natural: Aphrodite or Arles, Anne, Simone, Anna, Isabelle, Andrea, Nina" (2002) features an exploration of the formal limits surrounding the portrait mode While the title contains more names than panels, each sitter differs slightly in appearance. Each face, moreover, was digitally enhanced at the artist to look like the Venus de Milo although place within different modes of vanity like as a frizzy, permed hair cast or pierced ears and nose. Muller's attempt to appropriate a true recognizable element of art history within the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the present transforms his work into historical romanticism.

The meaning of a 8-panel portrait piece by way of Zhang Huan titled "Family Tree" however, exists at the intersection of fiction, history and the rife day. By using the individual face as a surface with which another applies painted Chinese calligraphy, Huan metaphorically intimations to China's control over the one and the other linguistic and visual forms of expression. As the sitter's face gradually disappears beneath the surface black ink, this work obviously contribute tos as a testament to the longings of those who live within a society that resists individual identity.

While portraiture was from far not the only genre of photography exhibited, the attempts made according to Van Balen, Muller and Huan merit recognition since they dare to engage in a methodology that finds itself quite at short intervals near aesthetic and intellectual exhaustion. Although the meaning of portraits usually outcome from a relationship of the figure to its surroundings, these images abstract the individual and challenge the viewer to evolve meaning through a self-constructed dialectic independent of the image.

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