Brush, Pen, India Ink, Masking Mediumon Canvas Paper
The Nameless Hundred is the first exhibition in Taiwan for Victor Balanon. The series of works in the same title is inspired by and refers to Max Ernst’s collage novel “La Femme 100 Tetes”. It was published in 1929, also the first collage novel. The title means: The woman a hundred heads as well as the headless woman. As each page contains a single print with a brief subtitle (the legend), the reader mostly follows the trail of the illustrations. Although they are intentionally confusing, the subtitles are crucial in meaning. In the first chapter for instance, the consecutive collages as a whole appear to reject the dogma of the Virgin Birth. The legends were also published subsequently by Ernst under the title Le poème de la femme 100 têtes (1959). Like Ernst's work, this series is also made up of collaged images appropriated from film stills, history journals and pictures from the Internet. Utilizing modernist forms such as surrealism & dada, constructivism & futurism- both in visual arts and in cinema- these pieces intend to present a pseudo-historical narrative of how Utopia was gained, and eventually lost.
Many works of Balanon are inspired by old films, based on photograph, or a snapshot of a film. In Balanon’s vision, the conjunction of cinema and art history, while suggesting an engagement with specifically modernist concerns, demonstrates rather the sort of hybrid omnivorousness that characterizes the postmodern rubric. His work is an almost wistful longing for a bygone moment, revisiting the past through its transformative resurrection.
