Dirk Braeckman's photographs are vibrations of tones delicately contained between the absolute blackness of a charcoal dusting and the radiant whiteness of flashes of lamps, solar rays or the dazzling of pulsed flashes. From the most opaque blacks to the most strident whites, the graininess of the light neutralized by the gray or by the twilight extinction of the color makes the details of the world rest on a surface of total mattness.
On a strictly technical level, these photographs are photographic, it is undeniable, but they nevertheless escape from the genre and are imbued with an intonation which is that of painting. Dirk Braeckman was first a painter, and this initial practice was decisive in the way in which photography then became the catalyst for a painter's gaze. Dirk Braeckman's art does not produce images because images have no surface, unlike his works whose granulation matters as much as a painter's touch matters.
A painting is first of all the story of a look. What we see from Dirk Braeckman's works is not the initial take but a particular look at the world where things are apprehended in a constant relationship with remembrance. What is shown is what was seen and then, partially or even completely, forgotten. The photographic act is only a first gesture of capture intended to be archived, sometimes for years, before an image is exhumed, as one exhumes an old memory. The image is taken, left, then taken up again, rediscovered, sometimes darned, rephotographed, reframed or calibrated according to a different light – as our memories are remade when we call them to us, in a wavering authenticity, veiled by the greyish confusion of an uncertain memory.
It is therefore not a question of accounting for a moment lived, it is not a question of producing snapshots, but of producing the story of a look, of restoring the way in which the memory of a place sedimented until it is no longer a memory but a picture in itself, a world closed on itself engaging in retrospect in its instability, in its evanescence, in the slight float of gray light.
A new publication titled Évidences possibles will be published on the ocassion of this exhibition.
