During Paris Photo, the international art photography fair, the Belgian photographers Aurore Dal Mas, Katlijn Blanchaert and Peter Waterschoot are showing at mi*Galerie, in collaboration with the Urbanautica Institute. An exhibition organised by the curator Dieter Debruyne.
Their melancholy works tell personal stories made up of dark thoughts and solitude mixing extremely well together. The trio takes you into a twilit universe made up of murky personae non grata, soul-searching notes and the quirkiness of time. Polvere, Limen and Ikebana Blue are very different approaches in sensing, exploring and reworking each one’s world in their own way.
Aurore Dal Mas’ Polvere takes its name from this coal-like material, very dark, on the surface a little blurry, which makes up the images. It is a mix of people and places that creates a kind of série noire, the darkness calling for slowness. No explanation of the situations, no narrative, hidden faces, nothing to look at here but bodies, often naked. The pictures look like burned monochromes, a troubled memory, subjects implode, like overripe fruits in a desolate world, collapsing in on themselves, with the idea of an imminent catastrophe.
Peter Waterschoot is showing Ikebana Blues, photographed between 2012 and 2017. With his specific photographic ‘method, he unveils a secondary decisive moment by investigating the effect of a clear, prolonged pause in the making of the image. The photographer deliberately lives away from the world while working in the middle of it. Peter Waterschoot steps aside from the never-ending parade of modern life in a quest for the slow lane and creates a space without time or place by playing with the time’s remote controls. But there is more to it than the deliberately decadent idea of letting time evaporate and becoming weightless during the photographic act.. Through the years, his colour palette started to broaden, as did his photographic vision. His work is turning more and more towards abstraction; translating the tranquility of his photographic locations in meticulously chosen settings, in tryptichs and polyptichs.
Turning to Katlijn Blancaer’s series Limen, the title (Latin for threshold) refers to the intermediate phase in a ritual where one finds oneself half-way between past and future identities, wandering around in no man’s land, having to act without knowing how. Limen is dealing with letting go of the past, leaving the uncanny transit zone and stepping into the future, towards a new identity.
Information
mi*GALERIE
23 rue Chapon 75003 Paris France
November 10, 2017 to November 25, 2017
