The Blinding of Photography
The unsightliness of the motifs, their bottomless anonymity, the sense of loss in nonetheless attentively observed details, all tell us that this world is recognizable, but not familiar, for it is completely random and insignificant, incomprehensible because it is tired to death of meaning. What a contrast to the images themselves, which burst with ambition and fearlessness, which strike out around them mercilessly and recklessly, self-assuredly demanding their place among other images. It is possible because in every image, the painter marks out his place with razor-sharp precision.
The images are descriptive – a landscape, architecture, a construction or a detail thereof. We can easily recognize the subject. Still, no one can escape the irresistible impression that there is also a narrator at work here, someone who generated a conflict and awaits a resolution, pent-up, panting. There is always an implied viewer, an implicit eye stretched across the entire visible motif, like cellophane over food. What is it that the observer is after? What does that eye want?
The conflict is also there thanks to a remarkable tension between the vehemence and the neutrality in the surface. Here the paint is used to colour in; there it is evocatively applied. Now the brush suddenly describes; then it abstracts again. The painter employs a wide vocabulary of means: now the linear stripe, now the wild sweep; now the great depth, followed by the flat plane; now the positive, then the flip-flop of the negative facing it. Suddenly it is the motif that follows, then it is the paint and the brush. There is so much variation and pleasure in the use of these means that you cannot avoid the impression that this work – despite the semblance of the contrary – is saturated with happiness. Painting is indeed not an artistic endeavour that by nature inclines to be melancholy: on the contrary. Here abides yet another paradox. Koen van den Broek uses photographs, and photography is – rightly or wrongly – repeatedly described as a melancholy medium that from its very soul is always speaking of distance and leave-taking. The work itself seems to be saying something quite different than the canvas: the work is strict, distant, absent, abandoned (which it has in common with photography). The canvas welcomes us with a cheer.
Conceptually, photography – the core problem of photography – is at the foundation of this work, the way perspective was at the root of the work of Piero della Francesca, or the problem of the subjectivized standpoint in that of Caravaggio. Here, we see how the photographic act challenges the creation of an image. While perspective installs a noble epistemology, the camera introduces the epistemology of a consumer democracy. Away with the dream of control and overview; enter arbitrariness and disintegration.
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The journey of the artist – once firmly in the direction of the Mediterranean Sea – is today to the new places of our visual culture. The trip is not motivated by a Prix de Rome and inexhaustible numbers of the memories of by-gone generations and their theories about things classical. Today, the artist is flawlessly driven by what is a primarily diffuse knowledge of film, likely to be registered in film stills rather than in well-developed scenes. The rhetoric of these images is as compelling a model as Raimondi's engravings were for Rafael. It is a source of inspiration, yet at the same time a provocation to transformation and variation. Nowhere better than in painting can we see the work of this fundamental shift.
The history of painting is a history of the way it has observed. In the Middle Ages, landscapes and figures led to decorative patterns. Exalting discoveries of ever new figurations followed the Renaissance. From the late 18th century, portfolios were filled with direct observations of nature in pencil or watercolour, assisted or not by the camera obscura or the camera lucida. Finally, there are photographs, since the middle of the 19th century. Within the context of these techniques for looking, source material was produced, the sketches that need to be further worked out, in tableaux with an individual signature, a colour palette, a specific imagination, a sensuality, a style. The fact that without these techniques to assist, what we call inspiration would not stand a chance is a troublesome conclusion for all who continue to think that the image is a child of spontaneity (and we all want so badly to believe it).
Today, more explicitly than ever before, photographs provide the source material for many painters. Under the surface, together with the photograph, is the sketching: people take on the photographic system itself. The camera is today's device for looking – the way a system of perspective used to be. And, just as for a few centuries the art of painting presented itself by way of the dispositive perspective, for a century and a half, painting has been occupied with employing the dispositive photographic element, at the same time that it defends itself against it. It happens just here, in this use and rejection. It is not in the motifs, but in the systems of looking. How does the painter turn photographic observation into an image? The photograph is in fact less than a sketch. It is something that is wholly and completely inadequate: it is not an image, at best only a registration. It is not a material that can be worked – such as a drawing that is homologous to a painting. The photograph must disappear as a photograph in order for an image to exist. Nothing is borrowed from the photograph. The photographic must be neutralized, played over. In this process, the distance is determined between the (photographic) model and the ambition of the image. This transposition makes the difference between what one has seen and what one wants to let others see.
Koen van den Broek travels, far and elaborately. It is no coincidence that borders touch him. He travels to the United States and Japan. In every image, there is a border, even though the title speaks of a car, a tent, a bridge, a train, a garage. It is always a car, a tent, a bridge on the other side of a border, where you can only take note of things as a traveler, not as an inhabitant. The "photographic sketches" are made with the same sense of wonder on the part of the traveler as the sketches that Matisse worked with in Morocco, Turner along the Rhine, Claude the Roman campagna. There, where wonderment put other painters into the landscape, Koen van den Broek is behind the camera, looking through a lens, setting himself outside and across from his motif, like an enemy, sharp and without feeling. His wonder is noticeably cool, for in these images, he does not look around him, but looks down. He is not looking for encounters, but avoids them. He does not look for motifs that make the country he is visiting specific and recognizable, but holds on firmly to forms of subject matter that one can indeed find everywhere. These images look more like a refusal to travel. Asocial photography: the opposite of the report in search of the face, the demeanour of the other. Van den Broek thus makes it clear that he is not an illustrator of tourist curiosity. How far removed this is from the declaration of love for the voyage to Rome!
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The painter firmly underscores the photographic origin of his images. He slides the photographic model under the paint and over the work of the brush. In their selection and their framing, many motifs are immediately recognizable as photographic. You only get to see them by way of the device. It is consequently very misleading to refer to Koen van den Broek's work as realistic (and a qualification between parentheses or brackets changes nothing of that misconception). Koen van den Broek makes use of motifs that are only seen as they are photographed (Garry Winogrand). The way that he shows pavements, shadows, the details of objects, comes from the camera, from an intentional misuse of the camera. With remarkable frequency, he does not frame the subject itself, but frames against the subject. He de-frames the subject. This is a visual operation that is only possible by way of this optical device. It permits a perverse use of the system of perspective that was once intended to make things visible in a clear and orderly way. Here, the camera cuts across that order by winching together the primary motif that stands neatly against a background. The result is an anti-image. We recognize a motif, but see at the same time that the registration itself did not recognize it. This distorted decadrage is continually carried forward in Koen van den Broek's work.
Because the painter takes a very literal transcription of the photographic registration as his starting point, in every image, we also see the isomorphic structure (Henri Vanlier) of the exposure working through. We see, namely, how the exposure, with a single, specific lens, was taken from a very specific standpoint. No human eye looks this way. It is how a machine registers. The photographic surface is an even and uncompromising projection plane, obedient to a static geometry. The moving retina, in contrast, puts us in the centre of the world. Van den Broek is never in that world. He stands exclusively across from it, facing a flat surface.
Take Tuymans, for example, who never lets the photographic origins of his images be seen in this extreme, technical way. He sooner concentrates on the banality of visual language, on the low rhetoric of the photographer, who determines things almost bureaucratically. Van den Broek reflects on the making of his exposures, indeed, without sociologizing on an anonymous visual culture. Just as Matisse shifted the drawing to the foreground of his painting, so Van den Broek places "the photographed" in the foreground of his own canvasses. The photograph was neither made nor selected for its subject matter, but because it allowed him to take the logic of the photographic disposition as the starting point for his thinking about images.
It is no coincidence that in addition to the emphatically photographic standpoint and framing, there is another crucial viewing device in this work, and this is the automobile. The different subjects were not sought out from a clear and thought-out pictorial standpoint (as in the case of Hopper), but are recorded as one drives past, cursorily and devoid of engagement. The work breathes the atmosphere of a road movie, where there is less discovery being done and more catastrophes being anticipated.
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The painter's underdrawing is left poignantly sensed in the image. Lines and line effects are crucial. Van den Broek thus translates the projected slides into a linear structure. A photograph that is inherently not a linear technique, but a zone technique, is thus literally transposed through a tracing process. Photography, the ultimate process that knows no "graph" process, is here forced into a graph-ic straightjacket. This is a procedure that I do not see in others who use photography, such as Tuymans or Richter. On the contrary, they accentuate the "zone", certainly not the drawing. With Van den Broek, it is that drawn character that gives the image something alive, that makes the image resilient and humorous. The underdrawing is a caricature of the exposure, the photograph. The more precisely it takes place, the less mood remains of the photograph. The photograph is pushed aside, drawn away, indeed by following it to the letter, but now with a graphic technique. Each canvas therefore owes a tribute to photography: its instant emasculation.
As for the underdrawing, it is worked on. It is worked over (the underdrawing was there first). Strangely enough, the working over is also under the underdrawing. Van den Broek builds up the image in such a way that he achieves both depth and height in the surface of the image (not the volume of the thing portrayed, but volume in the painting itself). He simultaneously fills in sketched-out planes, pigment by pigment, and leaves others blank. The use of white is consequently crucial. Around the white, his image rocks from flat to deep, from abstract to figurative, positive to negative, from full to hollow. Whereas only one optic rule can be followed and only one idea realized in a single photograph, very even in a single thin surface, Van den Broek makes an image in which every zone, brushstroke, graphic underline or pigment is supported by a precise decision, a strategic choice, a thought of its own, a specific, referential quotation.
The photograph consequently seems to be a fundamental accord with which the painter builds further variations. There is a highly tensed yet very relaxed play in the painted surface. One segment is Matisse, another Warhol. A rock looks like Courbet, the red of a car like Hopper. His images are spun-out dialogues with the earlier presentations he has enunciated. The past does not lie behind him, but on his canvas, in enormous diversity of colour and painting effects. He does not paint with red, but with Hopper, not in browns, but with Courbet, as though he and the past are battling it out in a card game on the gaming table of (a) photographic registration. "What would you do here now? Then, what do you do there?"
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What makes his work so rich and most of all, so full of promise is that there is no question here of a passive subjugation of visual culture, but of a masterful counter-coup, with the condition that he – as a painter – digs deeply into the photographic.
Take, for example, the series with cracks or fissures – at once both road and boundary. In a series not unrelated to Monet, he produces variations on that theme. The theme is a statement of what boundary and trajectory are, about waiting at the border and racing forward along a route, about restriction and extreme lack of restrictions, the definite and the wildly indefinite. But the theme is also a theme of form. The straight line is overgrown with a weed-like web of whimsical fissures in the crust. The geometric section of road, with its road markings, lay under an unstructured, rampant overgrowth, a broken structure of lines without purpose or meaning. This little network lies like an abstraction on top of the figurative network. They are two plastic options presented concurrently in a weird and wondrous way.
The painter who once began with minimalist work, in which pure form prevailed, has slowly absorbed the figurative reference, without wiping out the ideological disposition of that minimalism. It is not the reference that is primordial, but the reference to the relationship to the reference. This relationship is not determined by the exoticism of a faraway world, but by very trusted photographic effects and procedures. As a painter, he gives retort and response to the photographic looking device, just as mannerism is a long commentary on perspective - that other device for looking.
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The work still holds more surprises. In addition to the toppling over and the reverberations between the photographic and the painterly, there is a second turnover, from description and determination to the narrative, from still photography to cinematography, from a motif from the world to a personage in the world, from a world of only just things to a world suddenly filled with a virtual presence. This effect is produced by the literal character with which Van den Broek takes over the photographic parameters, such as framing, and consequently the vantage point of his photographs. Again a comparison with Richter and Tuymans is instructive. They use photographs as registrations of something, while Van den Broek uses them as registrations made by someone. The subject is therefore coupled to a view(er), an outlook, a space "behind" a face, in which an activity – looking – can be situated. In film, this is known as the subjective, or the point-of-view shot.
Again, Koen van den Broek makes no use of this subjective viewpoint to underscore the value of the subject matter, but to indicate its convertibility. Moreover, the position that the camera gives us is not one of respect, but of its opposite, of examination without respect. The painter has chosen no scenes, but objects, no people, but material arrangements, traces of people and their having passed by, their aleatory, transparent character. Modern ruins – without historic relevance, without enthusiasm, never inviting one to stand still and silent in order to hear the voice of the one or thing remembered. No, it is not a ruin, but detritus: of a road surface, of the edge of a pavement; a random, coincidental state of the world, accidentally met. The result is a ruin of the making of the image itself.
This "look" brings with it a number of qualifications. It is a hurried and inattentive glance, sniffing for a subject, for the motif on which one cannot focus. The snooping around is taking place under a cloud of threat: gazing down onto the pavement and the road gives no overview, hence no control. The unknown – as the unknown, already implicitly a danger – hovers at the edge of the image, lurks in a shadow, skulks at the wall's edge. Attentive study is at once hopelessly blind and impotent. Whatever information might be collected, it is too punctilious and consequently unenlightening. A car window, with a landscape hung against it like wallpaper, the enlargement of a detail of a stoop or footpath, as if that blow-up would unlock a secret, a shadow throwing itself threatening over the shoulder into its field of vision. Everything has an atmosphere of suspense. Hitchcock and Lynch are never far away. What is so fascinating is that both have so often shown that the threatening element is not only in the abandoned streets of a metropolis, but can certainly also be generated – and more furiously – in a landscape. Not melancholy and introspective nature – so long the idea of the landscape tradition – but the terror of an overfilled emptiness in which one looks forward in vain for identifiable form.
With this, Koen van den Broek again relates to the great tradition of narrative images in which the relationship of figures to their environment repeatedly includes a moment of truth. Nothing here is clearer than the work of Poussin. Koen van den Broek, however, is a painter of our time. The personages have disappeared from the image and have grouped themselves in front of the canvas, looking at their decor, at the location selected for the drama where they will soon have to play out their miserable roles, like an equally lost Cary Grant in an Eric Fischl painting. Perhaps the great art can indeed be read in the dryness with which fear and the intolerable are reported.
Dirk Lauwaert