Rémy russotto
Twilight
The young Belgian artist Rémy Russotto likes to leave the objects of his photographies in the
vague and the foggy twilight. In both series, ‘Faces’ and ‘Abstracts’, it is up to the viewer to
make out what Russotto actually captured in his photographs, or to take them as an abstract
composition of unusually refined and attractive coloration.
Driven by the conviction that nowadays photographs have the authenticity of a manipulated
and prearranged reality, Russotto in his portrait series ‘Faces’ opts for returning to a more
magical time in photography. He fabricates portraits of ethereal transcendency that evoke
the softest pencil drawings, in which erasure is used to remove all but the essential.
Russotto reflects on the question of just how much information it takes to suggest a face.
Even though on first view many of his portraits appear to be a solely abstract composition,
Russotto astutely plays with the fact that human radar is acutely sensitive to faces and
anything resembling a face is sure to imprint itself instantly on the mind. His photographs
radiate the idea of the human face as a terrain or landscape with the less pronounced parts
lying in shadow and the prominent parts exposed to the light. The character, personality or
idiosyncracies of his sitters all seem irrelevant. Instead, Russotto achieves a total
disengagement with the real world.
And again in the ‘Abstract’ series Russotto’s photographs confound perception, as our
brains desperately search for or impose meaning. In this constant search for hints of the real
world, we come across objects that we gladly ‘identify’ and locate in the merely suggested
space. In their betrayal and bewildering ambiguity, the photographs ask if a space or object
actually needs to exist in order to be photographed. Russotto artfully shifts the process of
formatting a picture to the viewer’s eye which, following its experience-based intuition, puts
the various ingredients together like pieces of a puzzle. And yet, the viewer is left with only
one certainty: what he sees in the picture might be there, but remains highly subjective.
Russotto is an autodidact in his photographic practice. Born in 1976, Russotto has been
studying Law, Philosophy and Literature from 1996 to 2000 at Louvain-La-Neuve University
in Belgium. He participated in various prestigious group shows. The exhibition at Brussels
Flamingo follows his very well received show at Brussels’ B-gallery (selected by jury from
MuhKa and Bozar), as part of the Bozar’s Summer of Photography festival in 2008.
- Press release fr (pdf)
- Press release nl (pdf)
Exhibition „Remy Russotto – Twilight“, 11 September until 11 October 2008
Vernissage: 11 September 2008, 6-9pm