„The empty mirror is a recurrent motif in 20th-century painting, a symptom of the limitations of painting's reflective nature (4). Its most notable representation is the theme of the woman in a mirror, taken up by artists from Picasso to Lichtenstein. The empty mirror appears more in an abstract space, as in John L. Moore 's work, where perspective and the play of light and shadow no longer dominate. The mirror as a simple oval of color can then create a bi-dimensionality and render it as a mode of representation. In his paintings produced in the 1990s, oval forms replace the human figure and turn into an empty mirror. Like Black and Blue (2001), mirrors reveal a certain irreality, an all-encompassing void. The artist deals with feelings of absence and loss, as well as a refusal of truth and a quest for meaning.
Valérie Belin explores the void, in all its phenomenological dimensions, with its multiple presences, appearances and meanings. The multiplication and endless repetition of reflections lend autonomy to the 
mirrors. They free themselves from our presence. Her black and white photographs (the Venice series) testify to this; the subtle play of the framing creates mirrors and objects in glass that are incapable of reflecting the spectators or even the artist. The objects are summoned up in their ordinariness and frozen in the preciosity of sparkle and transparency. These mirrors refer solely to themselves, reflecting void and absence ad infinitum, like a cemetery of contemporary vanities. The mirror remains a void that we never cease trying and fill in, calling for human presence. The “voids” in this case are paradoxically full of a presence of their own, veering between disparition and apparition.
Valérie Belin (1964) Untitled, 1997. Venice Series (Mirrors). Black and White Photograph, 100 x 80 cm (image size). Courtesy of Renos Xippas Gallery, Paris
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