Book Review: I Close My Eyes, Then I Drift Away
Katrien De Blauwer I Close My Eyes, Then I Drift Away (with photography by François Halard) © 2019 Libraryman
From Clicks to Cuts
I Close My Eyes, Then I Drift Away is the title of Katrien de Blauwer’s visual narrative that transforms François Halard’s archived photographs into a modernized multi-leveled story. Katrien de Blauwer’s work is constantly expanding the boundaries of existing material from the past by creating surprising and new, open-ended narratives. Intentionally cutting, re-composing, altering the photographs and re-situating the work within her own world, she mediates the intimate and universal role of this book.
Katrien De Blauwer I Close My Eyes, Then I Drift Away (with photography by François Halard) © 2019 Libraryman
Her inclination towards collage began when she first created moodbooks for fashion collections. The chosen juxtapositions of elements are at times whimsical, playing on meaning, natural visual reciprocities and stunts. She is skilled at creating mood through color combination and textures, sometimes adding it with the help of a single brushstroke across the photograph. Her work has the power to look vintage and feel contemporary simulaneously.
Katrien De Blauwer I Close My Eyes, Then I Drift Away (with photography by François Halard) © 2019 Libraryman
It is a wonderful to experience how playful the visual elements are together, jumping to different formats and carrying varied moods as you go on. The meticulous images operate in a way that allow and ask the viewer to make assumptions and associations. The purposeful fragmentation makes body parts seem abstract at times, cutting off faces, removing any opportunity for a gaze to come through and making the bodies anonymous and weirdly universal. The abstraction of the collages lend to that open-endedness, and while they take in consideration both François Halard’s and Katrien de Blauwer’s artistic visions, they ask us to reconsider them in a new light.
Katrien De Blauwer I Close My Eyes, Then I Drift Away (with photography by François Halard) © 2019 Libraryman
In different ways, both artists deal with spaces that artists engage in. François Halard photographs spaces that artists literally inhabit and interprets them, and Katrien de Blauwer appropriates the spaces that artists metaphorically occupy; their own work. Her collages are evocative of Halard’s own notebook pages filled with scraps of papers and notes on display in his Visual Diary book. The technique of collage makes it seem like a diary, an unusual one that would be up to interpretation.
Katrien de Blauwer gracefully compliments François Halard’s photographs, allows them to engage in other narratives and retains aspects of their original place in his archives. Images have this endlessly recyclable quality to create and re-create varying narratives for different people. Here, narratives build naturally from the suspense in the relationship between the images, and tension arises from the fact that everything is in fragments. Katrien de Blauwer works with her unconscious in creating these collages. It makes sense then, that there would be this flexibility of meaning entrusted upon the viewer.
Katrien De Blauwer I Close My Eyes, Then I Drift Away (with photography by François Halard) © 2019 Libraryman
