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8/3/2007

Yves Ullens

Young Gallery, Bruxelles

No Limits

Having been a "photomateur" for a long time, to use Gisele Freund's expression, Yves Ullens decided at the age of 40 to transform his hobby into a way of life. He put down his first marks as a teenager, in a makeshift darkroom at his paternal grandmother's house. She was a photographer, filmmaker, writer, archaeologist and a friend of the explorer and photographer Ella Maillart. Yves Ullens spent the equivalent of his final year of secondary school in Newport, in the United States. There he had the opportunity to study photography and above all learn how to observe. His teacher emphasized to him that a camera is not a gun. "It's not just about shooting, but about identifying what is meaningful to us in order to be able to transmit it. Looking means observing light and framing as we move rather than zooming in ".

At this stage, he was not yet attracted to the abstract ­ in fact as a teenager he was afraid of it. A trip to Turkey in 1996 gave him his first artistic experience. What might have been merely a holiday snapshot (a photograph of a salt lake hastily taken through the window of a bus) proved to be pure abstraction, blurring perspectives into an unexpected formal experience. The snatched picture showed him the expressive power of colour and light in a fortunate encounter due to chance. Yves has worked to reproduce this artistic experience ever since by keeping his senses constantly alert. Moving beyond portraits and landscapes - the staples of the amateur photographer's repertoire - he sought out other channels, transcending the emotional purpose of a fixed image, from memento mori to pure experimentation and creativity. An abstract series was realized in Venice, and he re-invented the cliché of sunset photography by taking

the picture from an aircraft. The Birth of Colours, taken in 1997 in Italy, was a revelation, imposing colour as one of his principal modes of artistic expression. A fishermen's cottage (called ŒCasa Bepi') in a back street of Burano, with a narrow façade of intense colour riddled with deep cracks ­ "these imperfections which make the distinct beauty of things" he says ­ became a living object in the evening light. A long exposure time and moving the camera by hand creates the hazy effect of a painted image and produces a subtle blend of tones. Since then, Yves Ullens has intentionally played around with the "errors" and taboos dictated by orthodox photographic practice ­ unusual framing, blurred effects, out of focus, zoom effect ­ to create new worlds where it is difficult to imagine the original subject.

Photographic trance

Yves Ullens dances round his subjects like a whirling Dervish possessed by a mystical rite. "Tracker of light", the expression coined by Genevieve Bergé, has become his trademark, explaining the daily quest of someone who chases stardust as though in a trance, always ready to catch an image. At the crack of dawn, just as a ray of light peeps through a thin curtain, the hunt is on. More than light, it is colour that attracts him. This dance, which he compares to tai chi and gymnastics of the soul, creates a universe where matter, texture, shape, volume, colour and the "state of light" have their own life, freed from the purely figurative.
Christine De Naeyer, June 2006

Young Gallery
75b, ave. Louise Brussels Belgio
09.03. - 14.04.2007
Hours: Tue-Sat 11-18:30

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