Echtzeit by Dirk Braekman
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"The few snapshots Dirk Braekman chose from the FOMU collection naturally possess the qualities he seeks in his own work. They are, in a way, Braeckmans in the wild. And that's precisely why he chose them. He saw himself in them".C.Chéroux
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For several months now, Dirk Braeckman has been immersed in the millions of photographs that make up the collections of the FOMU (Museum of Photography in Antwerp).
He allowed himself to be seized - to this exact point of "shock". First, he removed from an initial, quite broad and intuitive selection, all the photographs made by artists and kept only the anonymous shots, that is to say, those without an identified author. For his project, he needed neutral images, unladen, or to put it another way: devoid of artistic intentionality. But beyond the fact that they are authorless, the common feature of the selected images is that they are open to adopting a qualification dear to the Italian philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco.
The common point of all these images chosen by Braeckman is, in fact, a question mark. Faced with them, and although they are mostly documentary images, I am constantly wondering what they show or what they exactly mean. They do not impose a meaning on me, but rather invite me to give one.
"All things are called to other uses than those which are generally attributed to them. It is even from the conscious sacrifice of their primary utility [...] that certain transcendent properties deduce themselves."A.Breton
What is the nature of the transformation that Braeckman imposes on these images? It is essentially alchemical. It is a transmutation. It is indeed about turning lead into gold. This relies first and foremost on a principle of reduction. One must begin by extracting the image from its simply informative context and thus annihilate its original documentary function.
He knows that he is walking on an extremely narrow ridge. He does not want to fall into abstraction. Something tangible must enable him to stand and continue to move forward. That's his tightrope, his balancing act. He wants to retain a certain substrate of reality from which he can then redeploy the image.
