The collages of Belgian artist Katrien De Blauwer flirt with fashion, dance, cinema, and photography. Some call her a “photographer without a camera”. Others would define her work as “post-photography”. Using magazine images from the 1920s until the 1960s, her work is all about recollection. Like a photographer, De Blauwer cuts or reframes images, pasting them together with others, or with monochrome strips from those same magazines. This process is a spontaneous one, kindred to the methods of a painter as well. While creating, De Blauwer uses different palettes with limbs, still lives, dark tones, colors… She applies her old and worn materials very sparingly, thus producing precious and fragile pieces of art, that are, moreover, of an exceptional openness and appeal.
She is also a master of composition, contrast and atmosphere. The series Double offers a selection of very recent work (2017-2018) in which she has come to focus more and more on one single image per collage. Between intense Red Scenes and sensuous Blue Scenes, we discover a subtle, grayish universe, gingerly interspersed with colorful touches. In Red Scenes (20), for the first time, we witness how the artist physically transcends the boundaries of the small format to which she has been so faithful until now.
The spectator here enters into a sensual, ambiguous, but nonetheless clean-cut atmosphere that reminds us strongly of film noir or nouvelle vague cinema. Katrien De Blauwer indebtedness to photography and cinema is indisputable. Recurring titles, such as Jump Cuts or Dark Scenes, clearly hint at cinematic language. Likewise, the title of this exhibition, Double, refers to stand-ins for movie actors in explicit or dangerous scenes. The subjects on view are doubles of elegant women. They are arrested in their movement, performing an unseen action, watching or desiring something that has been literally cut away from them. De Blauwer, scissors and glue in hand, keeps us wondering about what is going on exactly. Here, the “incomplete” images are arranged in such a way that, together, for the duration of the exhibition, they compose a new (im)possible film scenario.
Katrien De Blauwer, Double
February 9 to April 7, 2018
Gallery FIFTY ONE
Zirkstraat 20
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
