Between the German school and the French school of landscape, neighbor of Thomas Ruff, Jean Marc Bustamante and Thibaut Cuisset, Gilbert Fastenaekens, Belgian photographer, has long been a proponent of the "documentary style", halfway between the modest reproduction of reality and the artistic reappropriation it induces.
Recognized early on for his Nights (1980-1987), nocturnal urban landscapes that broke with the omnipresent photo-reportage of the time, he took part in the Datar's photographic mission on regional planning in France and won the Kodak prize for photographic criticism in 1986.
Thereafter, through several commissions on the notion of territory, he pursues an assiduous observation of the city and the landscape, detached from the anecdotal and the easy sentimentalism. He joins to the notion of landscape, which he circumscribes to a small and increasingly narrow perimeter, all the force of an intimate experience, this one taking all its extent in the strictly delimited plot of a forest in Champagne-Ardenne, which he surveys from 1988 to 1996. Noces is an asceticism bordering on the obsessive, a kind of zoom on the pattern that transgresses the documentary value by the loss of geographical, physical and photographic reference points. The subject, translated by a multitude of shades of gray, almost disappears in favor of an abstraction where Pliny's cosa mentale sends the artist back to the depths of himself. This series is the subject of a book that will be published for his retrospective at the gallery Le Château d'Eau in Toulouse.
At the same time, from 1990 to 1996, Gilbert Fastenaekens continued his work on Brussels, published under the title Site (ARP Editions, 1997) composed of photographs, always in black and white, dealing with the development of the urban fabric. He exhibits it like a set of large books whose pages turn over the course of the day and where each image can be confused or completed with the following one, like an element of an encyclopedia of simple forms constituting a city. This silent and radical composition that the artist shows on lecterns is the beginning of a long work on his city, Brussels, which he chose as an archetypal possibility representative of all cities with chaotic urban developments.
From 1993 onwards, Gilbert Fastenaekens abandoned the exhibition phenomenon for a while and became a publisher, with landscape in contemporary photography as his editorial line -ARP Editions. It is only recently that he returned to the principle of the exhibition with his latest series on Brussels, which he has just shown at the Centre d'art contemporain des Brasseurs, in Liège, and at the Galerie Ledune, in Brussels. It is the latter that will be exhibited at the gallery Les filles du calvaire, while the gallery Le Château d'Eau will devote its premises to a retrospective reading of his work, echoing the exhibition at FLAC© - Casino Modern Waterschei, in Genk, Belgium.
Paris
Here again Brussels is a long-term work on the pattern, "made of insistence and obsessions that end up producing", as the artist specifies. This abecedarian approach, an extension of Site, attempts to transcribe the different architectural forms present in the city: curtain walls, groups of towers, individual houses drowned among buildings .... But we are far from a classic documentary approach to the urban landscape because Gilbert Fastenaekens, who frames these elements in a radical way, feeds here an architectural vision that goes beyond the documentary to the benefit of an almost theatrical scenography. The particular precision of these camera shots allows us to get very close to an infinite number of details, while the monumental size of the works invites us to be absorbed by a thorough reading. This sensation is also supported by the abandonment of black and white baryta in favor of a very fine inkjet print that reinforces the depth of the colors, itself accentuated by a mattness of the inks and the paper that absorbs the eye, as if the artist had rediscovered the sensuality of his blacks in this contemporary technique.
Although he is a photographer who resolutely relies on a radical, even ascetic language, totally removed from any pictorialist effect, we feel here that Gilbert Fastenaekens is less interested in the places themselves than in the visual, even sensual, experience they provide. And, like the painter or the sculptor, he proceeds in this way to a transformation of the subject to the benefit of what could be called photographic emotion or sensation.
The spectator is thus led not only to look, but also to live these images, some of which reach 2.5 meters, as a physical experience, even to apprehend them like sculptures. In a second phase, they can be read as almost abstract surfaces, punctuated by the colors, the tactile aspect of the materials, the play of light and the rhythm of the architectural elements. When the dimensions of the work are more modest, it is this second approach that imposes itself. But whether their impact balances between the sculptural or, on the contrary, the liberation of volume and depth, these images testify to the photographer's ability to transform.
Christine Ollier
