Bram Van Stappen - L'Ombre des Belges (II)

L'Ombre des Belges by Bram Van Stappen is a visual exploration that defies traditional narrative and linear logic, instead embracing fragmented, textured imagery. L'Ombre des Belges confronts themes of materiality, cultural artifacts, identity, etc. Through a series of mostly paired images, L'Ombre des Belges evokes a world where objects, nature, and human presence intertwine but never resolve. The work dismantles conventional hierarchies, presenting axes like surface vs. texture or natural vs. cultural not as fixed, but as fluid and ever-changing.

The series questions the nature of the images themselves, offering no clear topography or typology. Instead, it’s an ongoing negotiation, where surface, texture, and materiality evoke history’s remnants and cultural codes without succumbing to simple visual closure. Each image pulses with presence and absence, creating a sequence where the form is continually unmade and remade. In L'Ombre des Belges, the photos don't merely document; they challenge the viewer to look beyond what is immediately visible, confronting reality's fragile, layered, and shifting nature.

Bram Van Steen's work questions the photographic medium in itself. He scans image element after image element, subject after subject, switches between abstraction and figuration, and focuses on the materiality of the subject or print. He searches for the uniqueness of an image or tries to arrive at an archetype through obsessive repetition. From medium format to cheap point-and-shoot cameras are employed to get a grip on the sometimes unreal everyday, to extract a comprehensible microcosm from a complex pool of impressions, atmospheres, people, places and situations. All this with an often anomalous photographic frame and a disorienting point of view to reduce his motifs to their most abstract form in an endless search for the code of the aura of the image.

Editing and sequencing: Bram Van Stappen
Design: Bram Van Stappen
128 pages
15.6 x 122 cm
English
Text by: Serge Delbruyère
Publication date: September 2024
ISBN: 9789464002508