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"Through Katrien DE BLAUWER's collages and their short circuit effect in our ways of seeing, the book intends to explore and deepen the concept of void and its visibility, proposing a work that’s situated at the border of different artistic disciplines, from photography to cinema to performance and to painting.
'Photographer without a camera', DE BLAUWER collects and reuses pictures and supports from old magazines and papers, engaging them in a vision that occurs directly in the hand, becoming thereby more physical and tactile.
KDB gives new meaning and life to what is residual, saving the images from destruction and including them in a new narration that combines intimacy and anonymity. Hers is therefore a work about memory, although never by a process of accumulation but by way of substraction.
The images are deprived of something that disappears from view but remains perceptible and refers to a kind of entirety. The collage itself is a signal that’s present and resistant, the form of an emptiness that is hence never absence.
Katrien DE BLAUWER’s work calls to mind the techniques of photomontage or film editing, using the cut as border or frame that determines what is visible and essential. Keeping in mind the collages’ highly cinematographic content, the book takes therefore inspiration from Michelangelo ANTONIONI’s filmic sensitivity, along with a few suggestions from the arts, that share his pure, geometric and linear vision.
Like the Italian director, whose 'interest - according to John BERGER - is always beside the event shown', Avarie has been trying to focus its attention on the unseen elements of the collages, such as the cut-out photographs and words from DE BLAUWER's notebooks or the reverse side of the support papers. In particular, the off-screen position of the texts in the book allows to frame the collages in-between: the void actually specifies itself as an interstice.
DE BLAUWER’s text-fragments - sharp, precise and evocative as scripts - interact with Antonioni’s writing which inhabits the book’s interstitial spaces: the extracts here inserted derive from what he himself defined as films I wrote, series of unfinished stories he never found the chance to shoot. Texts therefore, that belong not less to the order of visualizations of the absent as they render perfectly perceivable an image that doesn’t exist." (publisher's note)
Review:
"Katrien DE BLAUWER’s collages are truly beautiful, and easily conducive to aesthetic contemplation. It is important however to understand the highly elaborate conceptual structure underlying 'I do not want to disappear silently into the night'.
The artist uses photographs from old magazines. She cuts them out in order to keep only the part of the image of interest to her, a part that she then pastes together with another fragment, gluing them together onto sheets of old paper. Sometimes, in a radical move, she uses a single image that she cuts out and recomposes. She thus creates elliptic narratives.
The photographs that the artist appropriates for herself are removed from their original context — removed from the magazine pages, thus loosing the integrity supposedly meant to grant them meaning — before being re-contextualized in their new links. Collage as practiced by Katrien DE BLAUWER evokes cinematographic editing consisting of cutting out a piece from a reel and gluing it to another fragment of film for the purpose of producing a meaningful effect." (Rémi COIGNET, source: https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=ZG111)
"Through Katrien DE BLAUWER's collages and their short circuit effect in our ways of seeing, the book intends to explore and deepen the concept of void and its visibility, proposing a work that’s situated at the border of different artistic disciplines, from photography to cinema to performance and to painting.
'Photographer without a camera', DE BLAUWER collects and reuses pictures and supports from old magazines and papers, engaging them in a vision that occurs directly in the hand, becoming thereby more physical and tactile.
KDB gives new meaning and life to what is residual, saving the images from destruction and including them in a new narration that combines intimacy and anonymity. Hers is therefore a work about memory, although never by a process of accumulation but by way of substraction.
The images are deprived of something that disappears from view but remains perceptible and refers to a kind of entirety. The collage itself is a signal that’s present and resistant, the form of an emptiness that is hence never absence.
Katrien DE BLAUWER’s work calls to mind the techniques of photomontage or film editing, using the cut as border or frame that determines what is visible and essential. Keeping in mind the collages’ highly cinematographic content, the book takes therefore inspiration from Michelangelo ANTONIONI’s filmic sensitivity, along with a few suggestions from the arts, that share his pure, geometric and linear vision.
Like the Italian director, whose 'interest - according to John BERGER - is always beside the event shown', Avarie has been trying to focus its attention on the unseen elements of the collages, such as the cut-out photographs and words from DE BLAUWER's notebooks or the reverse side of the support papers. In particular, the off-screen position of the texts in the book allows to frame the collages in-between: the void actually specifies itself as an interstice.
DE BLAUWER’s text-fragments - sharp, precise and evocative as scripts - interact with Antonioni’s writing which inhabits the book’s interstitial spaces: the extracts here inserted derive from what he himself defined as films I wrote, series of unfinished stories he never found the chance to shoot. Texts therefore, that belong not less to the order of visualizations of the absent as they render perfectly perceivable an image that doesn’t exist." (publisher's note)
Review:
"Katrien DE BLAUWER’s collages are truly beautiful, and easily conducive to aesthetic contemplation. It is important however to understand the highly elaborate conceptual structure underlying 'I do not want to disappear silently into the night'.
The artist uses photographs from old magazines. She cuts them out in order to keep only the part of the image of interest to her, a part that she then pastes together with another fragment, gluing them together onto sheets of old paper. Sometimes, in a radical move, she uses a single image that she cuts out and recomposes. She thus creates elliptic narratives.
The photographs that the artist appropriates for herself are removed from their original context — removed from the magazine pages, thus loosing the integrity supposedly meant to grant them meaning — before being re-contextualized in their new links. Collage as practiced by Katrien DE BLAUWER evokes cinematographic editing consisting of cutting out a piece from a reel and gluing it to another fragment of film for the purpose of producing a meaningful effect." (Rémi COIGNET, source: https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=ZG111)
- Ed(s)/Author(s)
- Michelangelo Antonioni
- Book design
- Vito RAIMONDI
- Format
- 1st print run, Swiss bound pb., 17 x 24 x 2 cm., 178 pp., 22 b/w & 118 color ills.), text language: English. Ltd. to 750 copies