On the occasion of her upcoming exhibitions in Venice and Murano, the artist Isabel Devos goes back to the pioneering years of photography.
She made the "Rock Scales" series using the "Wet Collodium" technique, a photographic process in which a light-sensitive layer is poured onto a glass plate and processed immediately. In this way, she not only takes us to the time when photography came into existence (circa 1850), but also to the period in which early Victorian travelers gathered images from around the world, who wanted to consolidate their conquests with this imagination. "Seeing is believing". Yet Devos' images are in fact scale models that in turn refer to the microcosm in nature and the oddities of the nineteenth-century explorers. A theme that was highlighted earlier in her oeuvre.
The choice to present the original collodium plates and not a photographic print is, therefore, the right form for this exhibition in this Italian glass workshop (s). These images of a rock formation on glass are only visible through the underlying presence of real matter, namely black natural stone.
These pioneering years of photography heralded the end of the ivory tower ideology. Romanticists such as Caspar David Friedrich, with his well-known work "The walker above the mists" (1818), saw the acceleration of society, the industrialization of crafts in black. It was a turbulent time in which new sciences and philosophies emerged. Just think of Nietzsche's “Der Wille zur Macht”, which deals with the fundamental driving force of man to dominate, to control, to roam and to rule nature. This steady evolution, at first sight, brought prosperity for everyone, but it is actually the impetus and cause for, among other things, social inequality, mass consumption and the current climate problem. And that is precisely what Isabel Devos deliberately raises with us through her art.
© Isabel Devos, 'Mountain', 2016, Inkjet on Photo-Rag paper (30 cm x 35 cm) American Wallnut Editie 4/5
© Isabel Devos, 'Das Gelàˆnde', 2015, Inkjet on Photo-Rag paper (60 cm x 44,6 cm) American Wallnut Editie 3/11
© Isabel Devos, 'Fog', 2016, Inkjet on Photo-Rag Paper (55 x 155 cm) American Wallnut Editie 2/5
The Contemplative Landscapes series initially started off during the daily routine on the way from work to home. Every day she passed through the sluices just outside the city of Ghent. On these man-made water gates, Devos noticed the traces of water and ground to photograph them. She isolates these parts from their context. A specific and abstract image arises, referring to the possibility of a landscape and the multi-layered characteristics of a painting. "L'eau passe" (2010) is the first image of the series "Contemplative Landscapes" and shows with beauty how nature reacts on human architecture. From this point on Isabel Devos grounded to research in the field of landscape photography and landscape painting. She searched for resemblances and differences between both mediums and eventually started digging into the history of painting from 1850 on.
As Steve Bisson pointed out before (at Devos's exhibition at Mi Galerie, Paris, 2017), through photography, Isabel gives us a pictorial view of the world referring to famous painters and their techniques eg J.M.W. Turner, Mark Rothko, William Congdon, Gerhard Richter and Rudolf Stingel and many more. The somewhat dark and gloomy color palette in several of the unique works in the ‘Contemplative landscapes’ series, but especially the charcoal like color field brings to mind what hard times these are for nature. Also, the two dark skies of nuits sur mer reflect on the hazardous, nightmarish trips refugees undertake for a better life.
© Isabel Devos, Rock Scales I, 2019, Wet Collodion on glass (13 x 18 cm) Slate Edition 1/1
But ‘Rock scales’ goes some steps further. It’s all about the fundamentals of photography and why it differs from painting: it’s a man-made machine to document the reality and has the quality to reproduce almost infinite numbers of prints. And, like no other, it can freeze a moment in time, just like a painting does. This beauty, the perfect balance between photography and painting, is the oeuvre of Isabel Devos now shown in both Venice and Murano: The complete series “contemplative landscapes” and the recent work “Rock scales” in their raw glass-plate form.
Backstage of the new work 'Rock scales' by Isabel Devos
INFO:
Isabel Devos
‘Contemplative Landscapes’ Photography
7th till 26th of May 2019
Official opening 9th of May at 3pm
Marina and Susanna SENT
Fondamenta Serenella, 20 30141 Murano, Italy
Dorsoduro, 681 Campo San Vio 30123 Venice, Italy
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LINKS
Isabel Devos
Urbanautica Belgium
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