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Introduction
We owe to Henri Cartier-Bresson what is probably one of the best definitions that may be applied to his art and practice: « Photography is an immediate response to a perpetual question ». We are equally indebted to him for having clarified the concept of the « decisive instant » and, so doing, came to be taken as diktat – against his own liking – and for long would saddle documentary or reportage photography. In short, it had to do with extracting a moment of apparent order from the world of disorder, making the unreadable readable, and the muddle clear. Injurious or benign, reactions had to be numerous, violent: refusal of sense, of clarity, of humanism, of universal discourse, of the laws of man or the rules of photography, of figuration, of the designation of the object, even of communication itself. Like each generation that preceded, our own must ask itself if it’s not living in the most opaque of worlds, the most incomprehensible and inextricable that had ever existed. Paradoxical and pragmatic, it is surely, as often the case, le Chat by Geluck who has the last word on this story, the final touch, the pirouette: « In the end, isn’t putting things in their place a little like messing up the disorder ? » Emmanuel d’Autreppe, April 2009
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Eaux vives, Peaux mortes (Oct/Nov 2011)
CONTRETYPE 1, avenue de la Jonction BE-1060 Brussels T +32 2 538 42 20 F +32 2 538 99 19 [email protected] www.contretype.org |
19.10.2011 >> 27.11.2011Publication of his first book
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EAUX VIVES, PEAUX MORTES/Alexandre ChristiaensSeascapes, voyage to Kythira
A boat, summarily fashioned by an electric cable on a hospital room wall, like an invitation for a sea journey. Howling rocks, hollering prows, rotted portholes, fogs, sea spray, shores. The concern to join together basic elements (the sea, the silver bath, the salts of life, perhaps...). The need for oxygen, of letting the imagination sail until it loses its bearings, right up to penetrating, consciously or not, the small mythologies, the underlying narratives. The jettisoned chronology, all this adrift on a slack sea, where any form of recognizable life seems absent, even the power of recognition itself. From there all things come, to there all things return, and everything is of value. To photograph between soul and consciousness, always taking to the sea, tempting the horizon, embarking for Kythira, in quest of other moorings, hypothetical, uncertain.
Text written by Emmanuel d’Autreppe / loaned to Alexandre Christiaens
grotesques and landscapes
From grottos to grotesques, there’s often just a step, a sidestep that feigns to flee, a slight shift of gaze that has us take a rock for a face, a face for a tree, a bough for a piece of sky. Or a concretion for something abstract.
Clouds, stones and landscapes each have their mood, each their light, each their memory. The photographer’s dive into the detail of caves or into the story of mannerist forms, his time spent in the darkroom – are not these all a kind of exhumation? Animist transformations, under artificial light, of a succession of stalagmites into a small tribe, mute and eternal... This is not a matter of gratuitous renderings of aberrations and trompe-l’oeil, but rather an attempt in each case to grasp this ambiguity, this faint rumble of life in the inert, this profundity veiled in time’s mystery, fragments of night in the very heart of day. Geological time that has these patinated plateaus commune with sparse vegetation, setting in motion a dialogue between these different, though complementary, realms. Mole hollows, eagle eyes, wheat shimmering, a whiff of the unicorn...
Clouds, stones and landscapes each have their mood, each their light, each their memory. The photographer’s dive into the detail of caves or into the story of mannerist forms, his time spent in the darkroom – are not these all a kind of exhumation? Animist transformations, under artificial light, of a succession of stalagmites into a small tribe, mute and eternal... This is not a matter of gratuitous renderings of aberrations and trompe-l’oeil, but rather an attempt in each case to grasp this ambiguity, this faint rumble of life in the inert, this profundity veiled in time’s mystery, fragments of night in the very heart of day. Geological time that has these patinated plateaus commune with sparse vegetation, setting in motion a dialogue between these different, though complementary, realms. Mole hollows, eagle eyes, wheat shimmering, a whiff of the unicorn...
Emmanuel d'Autreppe
Harbor landscapes
Lights, colors and masses... Our lives like cubes, posed at water's edge. The structures carry man or crush him, he seems absent but it is indeed he who sets the rig, struggles with it, repaints, constructs, overloads, lands. Man's activities, especially, create a quite specific architecture, rational or gigantic, tarnished by the aggressive surf or streaked with bright colors under the sun, staggering or impenetrable, secret. China, India, or old Europe. Well-rooted symbols of a complex globalization, the ports of the world resemble each other or disassemble each other, refer back one to the other and echo: they invent the city of tomorrow but with feet bathed heavily in the past, to the water's own slow rhythm. Like a painting that hypnotizes our gaze, the photography delves into urban development, our relentless conquests on the land, the ever-growing ruin of the scrap heap, the world's hubbub... But it also bursts forth beyond the piers, beyond frontiers, bursts forth in contemplation. The gaze remains magnetized by these vast horizons and seemingly immutable pure surfaces. Seas and oceans inevitably return us to ourselves, to the overflowing flux of our humanity...
Text written by Emmanuel d'Autreppe / loaned to Alexandre Christiaens
Industrial landscapes
Industrial landscapes, for their desolate beauty. For the traces they bear, marks of a time when man produced, transformed, constructed things that fit the hand, palpable things, things that aged along with him and whose possible beauty came as an extra. Cars, grain, steam, canned goods, armrests. River basins, railways, the South of France, Romania, or elsewhere. With the patina of years and the warehouses of history, with the melancholy of the void and the natural world that gnaws and regenerates, by themselves, these neglected locations become tableaux.
Instead of composing them as would a painter, the photographer can remove them from the withered continuum of a civilization, strange and fascinating statues of the mechanical age, still barely standing, almost inhabited, structures where courage inevitably ends up on familiar terms with the absurd, to then renounce it.
Emmanuel d'Autreppe
If the rest is chaos...
And then there’s all the rest. The things without name, without reason, without kin, sometimes without form. Or in any case without anything of the definitive, as though suspended between order and disorder, between here and somewhere else, between the past and that still to come. The bric-a-brac of a dark room, perhaps the head of the photographer himself.
A drawer of simple proximities, where some “simple” images of the world collect, outside any serial context, beyond any common thread or aesthetic. Here, the object of attention often rubs shoulders with the unknown, or the indefinable, or the impenetrable. Tending to isolate certain elements (taken note of, certified or perturbed), but above all to open new doors, to preserve ambiguity, to pierce the lining, the reverse side of the depth of things, right to the first appearance of phenomena, right to the tremble of life..
Emmanuel D'autreppe
Onze (June/Sept 2011)
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Between dog and wolf (Mar/Apr 2010)
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Annie Pattyn, Oostduinkerke (Dec/Jan 2010)
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Post-it zones, Galerie Rossi Contemporary (2009)
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Just in time, Moulins de Ruysbroeck (2008)
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Les Brasseurs (2007)
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Escales, Théatre de Namur (2006)
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Biography
Alexandre Christiaens (b. 1962) Cabinetmaker, sculptor and artist, Alexandre Christiaens is above all someone impassioned by travel and the sea. In 1999, he made a number of extended visits between the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth, Ostend, Venice, Calais, Dover and the Opal Coast, and employed a range of analogue cameras to fix on film a series of photographic impressions, entitled Marines. It would be the start of a new artistic orientation, one to which he fully devoted himself today. His work is imbued with a sculptural dimension: it has to do with, right at the image’s surface, excavating in natural or artificial material, and rendering the heavy structure of things.
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Selected exhibitions and residencies
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
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2003
2002
2002-2000
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Alexandre Christiaens
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