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20/4/2010

Arno Roncada

Bozar - Centre for Fine Arts, Bruxelles

Starting in 2010, BOZAR EXPO is launching a new series of photographic exhibitions in cooperation with the FotoMuseum Antwerp. Each show in the "Junctions" series will bring a contemporary photographer face to face with the FotoMuseum's historical collections. The photographer Arno Roncada opens the series with an exhibition in the foyers adjoining the Henry Le Boeuf Hall.

The Belgian photographer Arno Roncada (born in 1973) does not take photographs: he invents them. He constructs images and perspectives, scenes and landscapes. The content of the pictures does not come entirely from reality, but from carefully considered ideas of the photographer's about reality. In this back-to-front method of working, the image is already prepared in the imagination before a location is found for it. Arno Roncada's pictures are, to varying degrees, invented in advance, built up and pre-visualised on the basis of a mix of instinctive ideas, critical observations, and rational models, both existent and non-existent.

His Peaceful Mountains of Desire series, for example, takes as its starting point existing mountain landscapes, but clearly these are not its real subject matter. A variety of formal interventions make it clear that these pictures want to lead a life of their own, independent of the specific locations. Just as the idealised landscapes of William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich have nothing to do with the Pyrenees or the Alps and start from the idea that "le paysage est un état d'âme" ("landscape is a matter of feeling"), Roncada works painstakingly and not without irony on a modern version of "le sentiment de la montagne". He creates puzzling, imaginary landscapes, in which he quotes from and refers to pictorial clichés, images from films, metaphors, and other elements of the collective memory.

It is on the basis of this photographic attitude that Arno Roncada approaches the vast photographic collection of the FotoMuseum Antwerp. He makes a selection of historical (landscape) pictures, which he works on, reconstructs, re-photographs, and "charges" with new connotations and contemporary kinds of cognition and confronts with works of his own. So this "Junctions" exhibition becomes a fascinating exercise in "looking at looking", as a contemporary photographer analyses how photographers of the past saw things and reflects on all this in his own individual way.

Coproduction: FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen

Support: Leon Eeckman Art Insurance, Nationale Loterij | La Loterie Nationale, Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest | Région de Bruxelles-Capitale

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Laurent Ney
Shaping Forces

In his quest for optimal form, Laurent Ney sees forces as the raw material out of which the engineer creates his structure, like a sculpture. Form and the interplay of forces are inseparably bound up with each other. Shaping Forces, Ney’s first monographic exhibition, presents an engineer reflecting on his own work in the light of themes like geometry, topology, and scale.

Co-production: A+ Belgium magazine about Architecture
Supported by: Leon Eeckman Art Insurance | Vlaamse Gemeenschap | PMR

Partner: Art Brussels

Image: Arno Roncada, Untitled (Self-portrait at Zabriskie Point), Peaceful Mountains of Desire, 2009

Press contact: Leen Daems
+32 2 507 83 89 leen.daems@bozar.be

Press opening Wednesday 21.04 at 11 am

BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts
Rue Ravensteinstraat 23, 1000 Brussels
Opening hours: Tuesdays to Sundays, 10 am - 6 pm
Except during the concerts in the daytime.
The exhibition may be seen in the evening by those attending concerts in the Henry Le Boeuf Hall.
Free entrance

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