Exhibition

Camille Picquot - Tendresse

14 Jan 2017 – 25 Feb 2017

Event times

All days 8am - 8pm

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Hopstreet Gallery

Brussels
Brussels, Belgium

Event map

Just like her texts and films, Camille Piquot's photographic works explore the boundaries between reality and fiction. Her interest in constructing images is expressed in her compositions and the details, light and perspective in her photos.

About

Words and images. They lie far apart but together they can reinforce each other and create new meanings. Words and images also go hand in hand for Camille Picquot. Very spontaneously and intuitively, she has been writing poetry, fiction and hybrid texts for years. They lead to both photography and film, the pre-eminent medium in which words and images come together. In her photographic work, poetry is never far away: both in the images and the titles. The titles can vary in language, depending on the sounds or potential meanings that the words generate in that language.

Just like her texts and films, Camille Piquot's photographic works explore the boundaries between reality and fiction. Her interest in constructing images is expressed in her compositions and the details, light and perspective in her photos. This construction is twofold in Picquot's work. Sometimes she creates images like a mise-en-scène; other times the quasi pictorial qualities of the photo are the coincidental result of a spontaneous snapshot. The image often originates from the area of tension between control and unpredictability. The camera's mechanical eye offers a possible renewal of capacities of the human eye. Picquot views photography like a way to create distance from daily reality or your environment.

Camille Picquot selected two images for the Window at Hopstreet. They are from the same series: the photo Tube oblique on the invitation and Dôme orange sur fond mat in the window. The French titles of the works are merely a description of a detail from each image, a pars pro toto. But the English title of the series, Domestic Flight, reveals something very different. It evokes the cold and austere atmosphere of airports, a place where every movement is strictly monitored owing to recent events. And that is the issue that each of the photos in this series explores. How can an artist approach reality as directly as possible so that (s)he primarily portrays properties like colour, tactility or textures versus materials?

This coldness is in sharp contrast with Tendresse, the title of the Window exhibition. Tenderness is a property that you attribute to something that is soft or delicate. Tender like the subtle, fluffy wool of the sweater or the almost transparent skin of the hands in Tube oblique. Tender like the movement of the lower arm and the billowing sand in Dôme orange sur fond mat. Hands are visible in both images; they are silent witnesses that betray intentions. Are the intentions of these hands unambiguous, merely mechanical? Or are they unpredictable and sensual? 

 

Camille Picquot (b. 1990, France) lives and works in Brussels. She studied at ERG and La Cambre in Brussels and at KASK in Ghent. Her work is currently on display in the group exhibition Marres Currents #4: Running Time in Marres, Maastricht (NL). Her film Hollow Hours was awarded a Wildcard from the Flemish Audiovisual Fund at the end of 2016. She is currently preparing a publication on the photo series Domestic Flight with Art Paper Editions (APE). 

 

Valerie Verhack is a curator at Museum M in Leuven. Museum M exhibits both historic and contemporary art in a varied programme of exhibitions. Within contemporary art, Museum M focuses on solo exhibitions of emerging and established artists from Belgium and abroad. Valerie Verhack was the curator at M for the exhibitions of Mary Reid Kelley, Oriol Vilanova, Michael Van den Abeele, Jessica Warboys, Isabelle Cornaro, Gerard Herman and others. She is also part of the editorial staff at Le Salon, an online editorial and curatorial platform related to Brussels' contemporary art scene (www.welcometolesalon.be)

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Valerie Verhack

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Camille Picquot

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