Presentation
For its first appearance at Art on Paper Brussels, the Huberty & Breyne Gallery is delighted to be hosting a solo show by artist Denis Deprez. Series of black-and-white works introducing viewers to the artist's Tagebau Garzweiler project, begun in 2015.
The images are the fruit of a research project focusing on a location in the process of change, in this case, an open-cast mine. Desprez's technique involved setting up a video camera on a tripod and taking a sequence of stills, which he then assembled to create a film documenting the evolution of the site.
The drawings shown in the exhibition are based on the video film and represent an extension of the documentary process. They also mark a return to the human level, a crossover occurring from the digital video image to the hand-drawn analogical image. The digital image marks a rupture with the physical world, the images being no more than a series of ones and zeros (in the binary language of computing); the drawing, on the other hand, reconnects us with reality, with the world around us.
This relationship between mathematical imagery, the computer-generated flow of the video, and the tangible zone of the drawing, is not to be understood as a dualist interpretation involving art on the one hand and science on the other. The aim of the project, rather, is to locate the practice of drawing in the critical space of what Allan Sekula calls industrial realism.
