Harry Gruyaert – La part des choses

Born in Antwerp in 1941, the photographer Harry Gruyaert is one of the pioneers of colour photography, like the great Americans he discovered and fell in love with at an early age: Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. Far from the nar­row confines of his native Belgium, New York in the early 1970s exposed him to pop art and taught him ''to cast a different eye on the ordinary, to accept a form of ugli­ness in the world and to do something with that!' His friendships with the avant-garde (Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nanas) reinforced what Antonioni's Red Desert -''seen a thousand times''- had already instilled in him: the need to explore the world, to throw himself into it headlong, not in order to describe it or to inform us about it, but rather to shape it, to model it. To render his perception of things instead of the things them­selves. To become a seer, not a witness. 

Harry Gruyaert describes this physical struggle, this hand-to-hand combat with things and beings: ''I throw myself into things to experience this mystery, this alchemy: things attract me and I attract things:' ln the flow of life, when everything escapes our grasp, and for ''everything to fall into place'', one must be bath present and absent, forgetting oneself in order to seize the matter, the texture, everything that makes up the here and now; while cultivating a sense of prescience, surrendering to an instinctive arrange­ment of forms, colours, symbols, light, and motifs. 

In Correspondance New Yorkaise Alain Bergala distinguishes between two types of photographers: those who believe in reality and make photography an art of presence, and those who experience reality as impossible and only capture absence. According to this reading, Harry Gruyaert would be an anomaly, a photographer whose visceral pres­ence in the world above all aims to capture its fleeting, intangible character. lsolated trajectories, disjointed spaces, bodies in the margins-the patterns in his images contributes to rendering the absurdity of the world, the surreal collage of life and its individual fragments. 

What if photography could be about communing with a state of solitude and telling a lie that is truer than truth itself. 

– Diane Dufour 

The exhibition gathers for the first time 80 vintage prints made between 1974 and 1996 using the cibachrome process characterized by the sharpness of the image, the intensity of colours and the saturation of the surface. lnvented by Bela Gaspar, a Hungarian chemist, in 1933 and first trade­marked in 1963, it is used to obtain a print from a slide (a positive to positive process) by destroying the dyes incorporated in the exposed and developed paper1s emulsion. These rare prints have been brought together exceptionally at the BAL thanks to loans from several collectors and from Gallery FIFTY ONE in Antwerp.