At Galerie Bigaignon, in Paris, artist Catherine Balet presents “Albedo”, her fourth solo exhibition, on view until October 4, 2025. The series explores the intimate relationship between water and light — two elements that here become much more than visual motifs: they are the true protagonists of a sensitive and ever-shifting dialogue.
The title of the exhibition, borrowed from scientific vocabulary, refers to the ratio between light received and light reflected by a surface. For Balet, this concept becomes a poetic metaphor. It expresses what the photographer seeks to capture: the constant and unpredictable interaction between matter, energy, and perception.
For this series, the artist has covered her prints with a textured glass surface. This material, far from serving a purely protective role, acts as an active membrane that distorts and diffracts light. The ripples of water and glass overlap to create new forms — geometric or almost abstract — that make the images vibrate depending on the viewing angle.
Balet’s approach is rooted in a constant curiosity about the intersections between different mediums. “I have always been obsessed with the boundary between painting and photography, and I wanted to experiment with new techniques to create something unusual with conventional tools,” she says. This philosophy is evident in every work: light, more than a simple tool of illumination, becomes a material in its own right.
Each photograph is conceived as a meeting point between the liquid element and light. Floating silhouettes, suspended fragments of bodies, and unstable reflections blur the contours. Faces are sometimes barely perceptible, as if swallowed by the movement. Elsewhere, the surface of a lake or river turns into a shifting fabric, almost painterly, at times recalling the vibrant strokes of the Impressionists.
In certain works, reflections mingle with flashes of gold, reminiscent of the stained glass windows that inspired the artist. In others, water seems to absorb human presence, reducing bodies to simple traces of light. “All the references from art history that have haunted me since adolescence are now part of my subconscious,” she explains. They permeate her compositions and enrich their reading, without ever freezing them in theoretical discourse.
This work inevitably heightens our awareness of the aquatic element. Water becomes a space for contemplation and memory, a place of intimacy where the body reconnects with nature in an almost sacred way. “Albedo evokes the light reflected by submerged bodies, echoing an ancestral, almost sacred bond between humankind and water.” The artist has also collected stones from the water onto which she has directly printed her images — touching objects reminiscent of the kind people make as mementos of family holidays.
The exhibition, which brings together around twenty recent works in addition to these objects, highlights Catherine Balet’s singular place — painter, photographer, and an artist fascinated by the digital revolution — in contemporary art. Here, she develops a body of work in which technique serves emotion, and where attentive observation of the natural world becomes a silent meditation on the beauty of the elements.
“Albedo” by Catherine Balet is on view until October 4, 2025, at Galerie Bigaignon in Paris.
