Katrien de Blauwer

The collages of Katrien De Blauwer (°1969, Ronse, Belgium) flirt with fashion, dance, cinema, and photography. Some call her a “photographer without a camera”. Others would define her work as “post-photography”. Using magazine images from the 1920s until the 1960s, her work is all about recollection. Like a photographer, De Blauwer cuts/reframes images, pasting them together with others, or with monochrome strips from those same magazines. This process is a spontaneous one, kindred to the methods of a painter as well. While creating, De Blauwer uses different palettes with limbs, still lives, dark tones, colours… She applies her old and worn materials very sparingly, thus producing precious and fragile pieces of art, that are, moreover, of an exceptional openness and appeal.

The artist is a master of composition, contrast and atmosphere. The spectator enters into a sensual, ambiguous, but nonetheless clean-cut atmosphere that reminds us strongly of film noir or nouvelle vague cinema. The artist’s indebtedness to photography and cinema is indisputable. Recurring titles, such as ‘Jump Cuts’ or ‘Dark Scenes’, clearly hint at cinematic language. De Blauwer’s subjects are arrested in their movement, performing an unseen action, watching or desiring something that has been literally cut away from them. De Blauwer, scissors and glue in hand, keeps us wondering about what is going on exactly.