Bruno V. Roels Trying to make it real, part 1 & part 2

“I think images are worth repeating.”

Bringing many years of work together in a single place, here on the page, rather than on the walls of a museum or gallery, we can consider both senses in which Roels thinks images are worth repeating. In the obstinate and dedicated labour of printing and arranging serial, but different, versions of single images together; and then also with regard to the overall effect of bringing these iterations of themselves into the same space. But there is another sense in which we might find Roels’s work echoing not only itself, but that of those that came before him; and that, funnily enough, is in his refusal to take himself, or his work, too seriously. Just seriously enough, it seems, to invest time, effort, and skill into the production of his complex and subtly nuanced work, but never to the point, that, like Ruscha before him, (the artist who made Various Small Fires and Milk), he finds himself unable to resist, and more importantly, to play with, the constraints of his own logic. A little like Dalí too, perhaps, who, captivated as he was by the potential of photography to document and catalogue the world, was also sure that this very capacity would result in us never being able to see anything in the same way, ever again. From ‘the subtlety of aquaria’ as Dalí himself put it ’to the fastest most fleeting gestures of wild animals, the photograph affords us a thousand fragmentary images culminating in a dramatized cognitive totalization.’ That too, is something worth repeating.

– Simon Baker

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Binding Paperback

Measurements 300 x 220 mm

Weight 1,40 kg

Language EN / FR

Number of pages 336

Book design Reg Herygers

€ 60,00 - ISBN 9789464002041

Ren Hang 我母親 - For my mother

Sheer visual poetry; the naked human body represented in fragile compositions

Chinese artist Ren Hang’s photographs are painfully provocative, but also inward looking and dreamily surreal. His genderqueer compositions are explicitly erotic but never pornographic. Hang depicts the human body as an abstract form, often in idiosyncratic arrangements and perspectives, referencing and simultaneously overwriting well-known motifs and traditions from Western art. He combines iconic images of William Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia in a river surrounded by flowers; of Leda, daughter of a Greek king, and the Swan; and of female nudes seen from behind using a distinctive visual vocabulary that draws on abstraction, Surrealism, Dada, and both historic and contemporary photography. Ren Hang’s analog photographs use a playful, humorous visual language to relate the feelings, desires, fears, and loneliness of a young generation in China. His works stand as symbols of the youth’s rebellion against the conventions of a restrictive communist regime in which nudity and sexual freedom are subject to government censure and control even up to the present day. Most of the people portrayed are the artist’s friends, but they remain unnamed and anonymous, and the images bear neither title nor place nor date. Although carefully staged, they are infused with an element of fleetingness and evanescence that is often the result of the artist’s quick way of working.Ren Hang’s photographs are a rare ode to human beings, their bodies, sexuality, beauty, and vulnerability.

– C/O Berlin, Exhibition ‘Love, Ren Hang’

Ren Hang (b. 1987 in Changchun, China, d. 2017 in Beijing) was a photographer and poet. His work has gained a growing posthumous following and immense popularity worldwide. Up to his death by suicide at the age of twenty-nine, Hang lived and worked in Beijing.

Technical Specifications

Binding Hardcover

Measurements 280 x 220 mm

Weight 0,65 kg

Language EN

Number of pages 64

€ 50,00 - ISBN 9789464002003

Jacques Sonck Twice

Twins, twice with a twist

Jacques Sonck is a discrete and introverted artist who portrays our society in a very genuine way. He shows us our fellow citizens up close, his vision is tender yet sharp; his seemingly objective approach is sprinkled with a delicate touch of humour though.

Each and every one of us could end up in front of his lens. Most banal physical appearances as well as peculiar profiles, all genders, skin colours, sizes, religions, shy individuals and fully aware ones; all at once they all sense this moment of strength. Sonck’s portraits are the outcome of street encounters, no other appointments in any form are made.

Jacques Sonck makes his subjects feel totally comfortable, one can witness ephemeral deep contacts in full trust in these remarkable portraits. He has this rare human gift of being able to approach strangers and ask them to open up to be captured on film. These encounters are furtive and truthful, they come to full bloom in particularly refined gelatin silver prints.

This new publication was initiated by Jean-Michel Meyers (also the graphic designer of the book) who came up with the idea of focusing on one aspect of Sonck’s rich oeuvre, in this case, pairs. All kinds of pairs: couples, friends, twins, relatives, siblings, but in the end it doesn’t really matter which link exactly binds them.

In this book we are triggered to know what exactly binds the two individuals, we are secretly fascinated by identical twins, by the sometimes bizarre duos, by the mysterious relations. I’m pleased to invite you to dive into this specific world of binômes within the rich oeuvre of Jacques Sonck.

Technical Specifications

Binding Paperback

Measurements 236 x 167 mm

Weight 0,26 kg

Language EN / FR

Number of pages 88

Book design Jean-Michel Meyers

€ 35,00 - ISBN 9789464002133