In the framework of the Ostend International Photo Biennale 2025, Galerie P. presents La Brise d’Ostende by Valérie Naessens.
If Valérie Naessens’s camera had been a net, it would have fished melancholy from the waves of the sea. In her photo series Brise d’Ostende, the photographer takes you through the soft dune sand, over deserted dikes, along the tide line, and back again. With nine images, she forms a walk that twists and rolls like the swell of the sea.
Not with oil on canvas, but with a lens, Valérie captures more than just blue. From the images, a feeling shimmers through that, for some, is poignant and for others liberating; that for some is frightening and for others protective. And a light source is always discernible, which, like a lighthouse, breaks the darkness and connects land and sea. Sometimes your gaze and the light meet immediately, sometimes it takes a little searching, just as it does in life.
Atmosphere
Valérie knows what darkness is and, after a depression, is finding the light in life and work more often. Where she once resolutely chose darkness in earlier creations, she now leans towards colour. There is room for light and nuance, albeit tempered. The melancholy continues to shimmer through in the shadow-clad columns of the Thermae Palace or the National Monument to Sailors, which hides under a layer of mist and merges with the landscape. The moment the photos were taken contributes to that atmosphere: just before the evening has completely tumbled down, when the world turns black and the sky desperately wants to remain blue.
Spilliaert
During l’heure bleue, with slumbering clouds as a companion and the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert as an example, she captured the series. Spilliaert – who, like Valérie, is from Ostend – used his nocturnal wanderings on the dike in his work. Both the painter and the photographer seek solitude to translate an inner world onto the canvas. During a holiday in Northern France, even before the suitcases were unpacked, the sea called the photographer to it. Time and again she returned – through the soft dune sand, over deserted dikes, along the tide line – to shoot new images. It was only when she returned home that she noticed the similarities with Spilliaert’s work and decided to stay on the same course.
Thus, the name Brise d’Ostende refers to a perfume created and sold in the seaside resort by Spilliaert’s father. The size of the photos is calculated based on the format the artist most frequently used.
The rest of the world
The images stand upright, in the same position as a night owl prowling the dike while the rest of the world sleeps. A surprising choice, as most coastal images are captured horizontally to contain the vastness of the horizon. By presenting the impressions vertically, she jettisons ballast and zooms in on the oppressive, melancholic feeling around which the series is built. And if you place all the images side by side, the lines from one photo flow into the next, taking you on the walk Valérie has mapped out; sometimes with a headwind, sometimes with the Ostend breeze at your back.
About Valérie Naessens
“They’re just like paintings,” says almost everyone who sees Valérie Naessens’s work. In 2017, the photographer found a companion in her camera that brings her peace. Since then, she has ventured out in gloomy weather conditions to capture the stories she wants to tell in images.
For this, Valérie follows her own rhythm. When she allows herself the time to dance around a subject and lets her work mature, the most beautiful things emerge.
Valérie is careful not to record reality as it exists. She focuses on details and finds beauty in fragments of reality. Her photos are a representation of her mind and flow with the bends of her life. The word that floats palpably before the lens is emotion. The images are atmospheric and cinematic, narrative and alienating. The colours are soft and muted.
The play with sharpness also characterises her work. By allowing slumber, she focuses on feeling. The mysterious veil of noise that hangs over her images is reminiscent of analogue photography. Valérie makes a point of not going further in the post-processing of her photos than what is possible in a darkroom. In this way, she manages to capture the atmosphere of bygone eras in images. She does this in her own picturesque way and at her own pace.
Valérie Naessens : La Brise d’Ostende
September 6 – November 16, 2025
Galerie P.
Kursaal-Oosthelling 10
Ostend, Belgium
Wednesday – Friday 2 PM – 6 PM
Saturday – Sunday and public holidays 11 AM – 6 PM
www.galeriep.be
