IMAGES

SOMNAMBULE (2007)

Visit Villa Cyclope for other series.

TRACES & RESIDUES

One can tackle the photographic work of John Sellekaers without having any knowledge of his rich musical production (started more than ten years ago). This does not inhibit at all the appreciation of his work, which, in itself, reveals undisputed formal qualities, be it at the framing level or at the colour level.

As for me, however, the only way I can think about John’s photographic practice is from the viewpoint of his music, those two activities mutually nurturing each other.

In many cases, his pictures are made with an approach that is similar to an approach used in the field of sound creation. Here and there, it is the same play of order and disorder, perfection and imperfection, cleanliness and dirtiness, smoothness and roughness, what is done and what is undone... A meticulous technician in both fields, John manipulates, with surgery gloves, a matter that is often repellent: pure noise on one side, "downgraded" sites and subjects on the other. In both cases, from the original raw material he extracts a form that has a chilling perfection, and which is at a great distance from the original material in question.

Even if he often borrows forms (series generally composed around a specific site), John does a work that is everything but documentary. Above all, John is a narrator, a creator of fictions with resources drawn from the very heart of "reality". Fiction, its possibility and its fragile equilibrium are at the core of his writing, be it sonic or photographic.

Far from being "soundtracks for yet-to-be-done movies" his records are movies in their own right, in the sense that they are crafted like fiction movies, and reveal a deep sense of "dramatization". In the same way, his pictures aim at giving way to the emergence of a narration, to the reconstitution of a story. John Sellekaers probes, and tends to give to the slightest site he photographs the appearance of the "scene of the crime". Something happened, something about which nothing is really revealed — probably because the author himself does not know exactly what it is.

There remain traces, hints, residues of uncertain human activities and passages. Each picture is to be put on file.

Mathias Delplanque.

Translation: Martin Lemoine.