Title: Trying to make it real (Part I & II)
Artist: Bruno V. Roels
Hopper & Fuchs
22 x 30 cm
336 pages
Softcover
Text by Simon Baker
English & French
2021
ISBN: 9789464002041
Bringing many years of work
together in a single place, here on the page, rather than on the walls of a
museum or gallery, we can consider both senses in which Roels thinks images are
worth repeating. In the obstinate and dedicated labour of printing and arranging
serial, but different, versions of single images together; and then also with
regard to the overall effect of bringing these iterations of themselves into
the same space. But there is another sense in which we might find Roels’s work
echoing not only itself, but that of those that came before him; and that,
funnily enough, is in his refusal to take himself, or his work, too seriously.
Just seriously enough, it seems, to invest time, effort, and skill into the
production of his complex and subtly nuanced work, but never to the point,
that, like Ruscha before him, (the artist who made Various Small Fires and
Milk), he finds himself unable to resist, and more importantly, to play with,
the constraints of his own logic. A little like Dalí too, perhaps, who,
captivated as he was by the potential of photography to document and catalogue
the world, was also sure that this very capacity would result in us never being
able to see anything in the same way, ever again. From ‘the subtlety of
aquaria’ as Dalí himself put it ’to the fastest most fleeting gestures of wild
animals, the photograph affords us a thousand fragmentary images culminating in
a dramatized cognitive totalization.’ That too, is something worth repeating.
- From the publisher's website
Bringing many years of work
together in a single place, here on the page, rather than on the walls of a
museum or gallery, we can consider both senses in which Roels thinks images are
worth repeating. In the obstinate and dedicated labour of printing and arranging
serial, but different, versions of single images together; and then also with
regard to the overall effect of bringing these iterations of themselves into
the same space. But there is another sense in which we might find Roels’s work
echoing not only itself, but that of those that came before him; and that,
funnily enough, is in his refusal to take himself, or his work, too seriously.
Just seriously enough, it seems, to invest time, effort, and skill into the
production of his complex and subtly nuanced work, but never to the point,
that, like Ruscha before him, (the artist who made Various Small Fires and
Milk), he finds himself unable to resist, and more importantly, to play with,
the constraints of his own logic. A little like Dalí too, perhaps, who,
captivated as he was by the potential of photography to document and catalogue
the world, was also sure that this very capacity would result in us never being
able to see anything in the same way, ever again. From ‘the subtlety of
aquaria’ as Dalí himself put it ’to the fastest most fleeting gestures of wild
animals, the photograph affords us a thousand fragmentary images culminating in
a dramatized cognitive totalization.’ That too, is something worth repeating.
- From the publisher's website
