KRYZTAL

After the exhibition Agrégat in 2023, Contretype/Centre d’art pour l’image et la photographie contemporaine is continuing its investigations into the exhibition as a model for presenting an artist’s work. 

KRYZTAL is neither a solo nor a group exhibition, it does not develop any theme, it is a new invitation to two photographers, Sybren Vanoverberghe and Sébastien Reuzé, to bring their work into dialogue. For Agrégat, the challenge was to invite two artists who didn’t know each other and who have radically opposed photographic approaches to create an aesthetic dialogue. Each artist had to take the risk of decentring his or her own practice. 

Sybren Vanoverberghe and Sébastien Reuzé already knew each other. What they have in common is that they were both showed their works  at FOMU in Antwerp, Reuzé in 2019 and Vanoverberghe in 2020. Sébastien Reuzé was also invited twice in residency at Contretype and his work is part of the art centre’s collection. Although each is at a different point in their artistic careers, they are both engaged in a search for new spaces for photography. Sybren Vanoverberghe, a young artist from Ghent, is not yet well known for his experimental photo works, but Sébastien Reuzé, who has been based in Brussels since 1993, is better known for his experimental approach that dexterously thwarts the codes of so-called ‘auteur’ photography. KRYZTAL is the choice they have made for a unique wander through photographic territory. Sybren Vanoverberghe’s black and white analogue-based work questions the relativity of photographic representation. He works in series and, whether on landscapes or industrial estates, takes an archaeological look at ruins, natural artefacts and debris, what remains when places have lost their function. He responds to the relativity that is the essence of photography with poetry and aesthetics. 

With Conference Of The Birds (2020), he produced a series of desolate, dusty landscapes, empty of human presence, tragic and desolate, sparsely scattered with crumbling earthen walls and dilapidated palm trees. Photographed in white, burning, blinding light, the palm trees, which were the leitmotif of the series, were gradually transformed into graphic signs that seemed to conjure up an abstraction in place of representation. In the Desert Spiral series (2022-2023), relics and building materials, as well as ancient symbols engraved in stone, evoke a mysterious, ageless cosmogony. The foreground gradually occupies the surface of the image, blocking out depth and drawing the eye to the surface. 

Sybren Vanoverberghe’s Sandcastles & Rubbish series (2018-2021) is a veritable materiology of metal details and surfaces, bent metal sheets and mineral fragments that evoke something tragic rather than a state of industrial dereliction. Used and discarded materials take on a monumental, sculptural presence that is powerful in its beauty. Abandoned objects and the random shaping of the landscape by erosion have the same character as timeless signs. This visual grammar, which has gradually taken shape, seems to be radically asserted in the recent Display Screens (2022-2024) and Musa (2022-2024) series. The motif is no longer easily identifiable; it is purely an object of photographic vision, holding the entire surface in tension. The black-and-white images are printed on polished or brushed aluminium or brass plates, on which, through reflections and the play of light, the material engulfs the subject.

The eye is drawn between the near and the far, between the distance needed to understand the motif and the contemplation of detail. There is no representation other than a neutral, generic image, almost abstract, that seems frozen and inscribed in the metallic shards and shimmering surfaces. The photos take on a monumental presence, no longer a subject giving them scale but the entirety of a photographic object. They can play with space and sometimes even leave the wall to be presented vertically on the floor. Sybren Vanoverberghe sees her work as a radical equation between photographic vision, light and support. Perhaps this is where his work meets that of Sébastien Reuzé, in Reuzé’s interest for literature : his photographic practice gives industrial accidents and reliefs a poisonous beauty.  Sébastien Reuzé continues to play with the elements that make up photography. Working with analogue photography, he uses colours, shapes and materials as words and phrases from his own world and imagination. But all the elements are in tension, and the plastic effect never interferes with the optical intensity. An admirer of American photography, his work unfolds like a visual road-movie, unfolding irrational and hallucinatory narratives and confronting visitors with flashes of reality that are like phantasmagorical mirrors. Sébastien Reuzé is an adventurous photographer. He feeds off the landscapes he visits and the scenes that pass before his eyes, which he records and files in his archives so that, later, he can revisit them, re-colour them and pass them through the prism of his illuminations of his imagination. Colour is central to his vocabulary. Iridescent, saturated, contrasting or flashy, they reflect his own ‘elsewhere’ in changing ways. In his own words, «my images navigate between different interpretations, like a tightrope walker in search of balance». Finally, thwarting the rules and invoking chance is a specific feature of his approach. Sébastien Reuzé is a fervent adept of «deliberate technical errors», to the point of making blur, overexposure, radiation, colour spillover, fading and reflections a veritable lexicon. There is something both toxic and epiphanic about his photography.

Neither Sybren Vanoverberghe nor Sébastien Reuzé care whether their work refers to a supposed objectivity or a real temporality. Their only concern in representation is that a photographic artefact should lead to an optical dialogue, a visual address to the viewer, offering a powerful sensory and memorial experience. For KRYZTAL, they both worked with images from their archives which, detached from their history and their time, became ‘free’ of meaning, malleable signs. 

Here, Sybren Vanoverberghe presents new works inspired by Display Screens, prints of photographs of plants and industrial debris on narrow sheets of polished and brushed aluminium. They are almost like photographic sculptures, all equivalent and similar, becoming the visual reference points and yardsticks for an experience of space. The light plays on these shiny, reflective surfaces, inducing unexpected visual effects that make the image visible, mask it, and force the visitor to move. 

Sybren Vanoverberghe has created a veritable performative installation, reminiscent of the spatial experiments of American minimal art, particularly Dan Flavin’s neon sculptures, in which the works and the visitors become neutral elements of the same body-sized space. Sébastien Reuzé’s response to these modules that punctuate the space is a series of abstract images (2002-2020), the result of analogue photographs printed on manipulated photosensitive paper. Small, fixed only by adhesive tape, these photographs are shimmering punctuations on the walls. 

Light, colourful and shimmering counterpoints to the density and scale of Sybren Vanoverberghe’s pieces, all these works are abstract signs that share the same origin of a photographic gesture. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are accompanied by the increasingly powerful sounds of rave parties, firecrackers and explosions. 

The exhibition ends in a black-wallpapered room featuring the video Mascletà, made by Sébastien Reuzé in Valencia, Spain. Every year at carnival time, the city of Valencia lives to the rhythm of the Fallas, a period of jubilation that culminates in huge firework displays. The city is deafened and the sky is saturated with smoke as the crowds wander around, electrified by the visual and auditory outbursts. Sébastien Reuzé gave free rein to his wonder and filmed the immaterial traces left by the moving light sources, these ephemeral drawings in the light of the sky. 

Visitors are invited to abandon themselves to this cosmic spectacle, to a suspended rhythm, to the bounces and ricochets of light from the video on the surface of Sybren Vanoverberghe’s modules.

Olivier Grasser