AURORE DAL MAS

Aurore Dal Mas’ 'Polvere' explores a part of the world in which we live: more and more abusive, degenerated, decadent and vain. 'Polvere' evokes something that darkens, that collapses, rugged and ravaged from the inside. The work feels like black dust, sticky, toxic and yet eminently attractive by the softness of the pigments on the paper. “Nessuno come noi” («No one like us») says a picture. Or “we’re better than that”. Only an ounce of hope perhaps, only a reminder in the night that a human being is made to stand straight, to be whole, to take his place - but neither more nor less. 'Polvere' takes its name from its charcoal-like, very dark, bit blurry surface. It is a mix of people and places that creates a kind of série noire. The darkness is calling for slowness. No explanation of the situations, no narrative, always hidden faces, there is no otherness to bare but bodies, that are often naked. The pictures are like burned monochromes, a troubled 'souvenir'. Subjects are imploding, like rotten fruits in a desolated world, inverted into themselves. There’s the idea that a catastrophe is rapidly approaching. 

www.auroredalmas.com

KATLIJN BLANCHAERT

'Limen' by Katlijn Blanchaert is a highly sensitive series that is formed by a nightmarish chain of images which tells a story of a troubled state of mind. The dark black and the somewhat gloomy color palette in the photos communicate on a direct as well as a subliminal level, a sense of anxiety and isolation, pushing the spectator towards a reframing of personal ideas on love and pain. The title (Latin for threshold) refers to the middle phase in a ritual where one finds himself between past and future identities, wandering around in no man’s land, having to act without knowing how. 'Limen' is dealing with the process of letting go of the past, leaving the uncanny transit zone and step into the future, towards a new identity.

www.katljinblanchaertphoto.be

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www.urbanauticainstitute.com 

PETER WATERSCHOOT

With 'Ikebana Blues' Peter Waterschoot explores a non-dualistic experience of physical and psychological space. Instead of embracing a wildly exciting world, his deeply romantic journeys meander from Venice up to Osaka, showing us a trail of quiet locations, away from crowds; this way the photographer is able to slow down the photographic process. 'Ikebana Blues' is photographed between 2012 and 2017. Within the frame of his specific 'method photography’ (referring to method acting) Peter Waterschoot unravels a 'secondary decisive moment' by investigating the effect of a prolonged stay on the making of the image. The photographer purposely resides “away from the world and yet smack in the middle”. Peter Waterschoot steps aside from the fast pacing stream of modern life in a quest for ‘slow lanes' and creates a 'non -space and time- continuum' by playing with the ‘buttons of time’. But there is more to it than the deliberately decadent meditation of letting time evaporate and becoming body-less while photographing. Throughout the years, his color palette started to open up, as did his notion on how he conducts photography. His work is turning more and more towards abstraction; translating the quietness of the locations in careful aesthetic presentations in tryptichs and polyptichs.

www.peterwaterschoot.com