"The sense of emptiness"
The vacuum is not static, it is a place where the subject can move and reach its fullness. The vacuum is like a bubble which « contains » until it controls, tames and engulfs the subject. It is from this emptiness that I apprehended the photographic work of Bernard André. A built vacuum, a dynamic presence. A vacuum that draws an aesthetic strategy unconscious of it's role.
Descartes proclaimed loudly: "Nature abhors a vacuum.". And here we are, sucked up by a black hole, in the contemplation of what is not, what is not said, not shown, only suggested as a provocation to silence. A silence that speaks volumes. Such an emptiness inside that makes us available to the other, which violates the manifestations of the « me » to make us communicate with the intimate nature of the photo. The empty spaces that are left free for our imagination. Free to enter the work or not. fascinating and dizzying freedom hidden behind that empty padded fog of illusions and Florentine effects. What fascinates us is the sudden incompleteness almost as a surprise that avoids fix our gaze.
Do not make things redundant , do not use an effect, let the eye glide smoothly over the grain of the photo as it leaves our gaze lost in the contemplation like you would do with the Zen garden Mu-Tei in Kyoto. Where you can not physically enter, image of absolute (vacuum) a place you can only access by disappearing into it. Yet his pictures are not following a search for absolute composition. It is the result of a moment captured, then reflected in the unique and experienced emotion. As if he had the power to waive from death by capturing the emotions in a photography. It is, perhaps, the significance behind aesthetic appreciation recorded in the emotion. It's as if the picture was just touching the art while forming an integral part of it thus confronting us with the real. The memory of these emotions that are not, offer us their poetic illusions and lead us to ponder. The use of black and white accentuates the dramatic side of this timelessness.
It is within this environment that leads his eyes to arise. A sight full of passions that exalt, until lost. A free and unconventional photography transposed in an infinite universe of memories and dreams.
Frédérick Da Soghe (2015).
Born 1968, in Brussels, Belgium,
Studies at CAD - College of Art & Design
Member of the Mascular collective.
Exhibitions
2013 - Château Vilain XIII - Leut - Belgium
2014 - Stammbar - Brussels - Belgium
2015 - Brussels Design September @ More Than a House - Brussels - Belgium
2017 - Galerie Jean Baptiste Bacquart / Photo St Germain - Paris - France
2019 - 9Hotel - Grand Sablon - Brussels - Belgium
2022 - Visual Gallery - Joetzlab - Brussels - Belgium
2023 - Connecting House - Brussels - Belgium
2023 - Visite Particulière - Visit Brussels - Oasis - Brussels - Belgium