Background information
"In the shadows and backstages of meeting places, in the spartan decor of run-down hotels, there is a resistance to the tyranny of sunlights and the communicants’ predatory smiles. / In the abstraction of dissolute nights, shards of infinity save us from the turpitudes of the day. We are with Peter Waterschoot, romantic voyager and inventor of heterotopias, navigating inbetween Ostend, Venice, Calais, Osaka, Hamburg, Cologne, Brussels, Istanbul; places where life has not yet been entirely brought under control. / We are passengers in a lucid dream, a cosa mentale inviting us into abandonment and a heightened state of mind.
Content
"Peter Henry WATERSCHOOT is playing with the buttons of time. Space and time markers are his taboo. The photoworks are a result of ever-consecutive trips, hunting for a heterotopia within the remains of the postwar period of the previous century. Much of the latter ongoing series are characterised by a dreamlike state and a sober, lucid romanticism.The photoworks evoque a meditative gaze and lead the viewer into a different state of mind. there is a recognizable color-palette (varying from copper-brown, bordeaux, gold, forest green, black, deep red, pink, yellowish, even purple even). But Darkness and melancholia are not omnipresent; in his latest work Peter WATERSCHOOT is ‘reaching out towards (blinding) light’." (publisher's note, © ARP2, 2018)
Critic
"Unfortunately, photography is not really fit to register a disappearing world, so the result is that these images show a world which even doesn’t seem to exist at all, the works seem to be a registration of a dream." (© Marina LUZ)
"Beautiful sense of color and darkness, a photo work about nostalgia without being nostalgic, photographed in a sophisticated and almost sly way, ironic and humorous." (© TODD HIDO, 017 Smedsby Paris)
"His photowork makes you experience a compelling, enigmatic, ominous but yet comforting magical realism." (© Geert OOMS).
"The idea of a physical and psychological journey is apparent throughout the exhibition. Peter WATERSCHOOT nods at the element of ‘timelessness’ which is recurrent along the experience of the space. His spatial observation, deprived of any time markers, are the result of a prolonged experience of a place. There’s a sense of interruption of a narrative, as well as continuity in its temporal disorientation. Elements like curtains, fog, windows and doors contribute to a sense of layering and separation of the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’. The untouched beds suggest an idea of absence, as well as Levina’s 'posteriority of the anterior'. The consistency in lighting conveys a meditative state of the artist, as a recollection of the photographer into self-presence, a withdrawal of the self." (© Sara FIORNO)
About the Belgian photographer Peter WATERSCHOOT (b. 1969)
Photo books by Peter WATERSCHOOT
- Ed(s)/Author(s)
- Fabien Ribery
- Book design
- Joel DOJO
- Format
- Pb. (no dust jacket, as issued), 19 x 28 cm., 84 pp., 72 color ills., bilingual text: French / English; Ltd. to 300 copies