In the past 20 years the belgian artist Dirk Braekman built up a career that finds his reflection in a sober but impressive exhibition in Museum M in Leuven.
Originally he studied painting and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. His medium is now photography but the painterly approach is never far away in his ‘oeuvre’. The delicate structure and texture of his photographs reminds us of the “Flemisch Primitifs” where the differentiation and transparency of textures are elaborated with the oilpainting technique and give us an impresssion of reality and detail. Dirk Braekman’s compostions though are very sober and with atypical cuts in the frame. His subjects are issues from his daily life, he works impulsively, but his photographs are not snapshots. He uses his motifs in function of the picture he has in mind, frame, composition, mostly frontal perspective point of view, color (mostly black and white) and texture are organized. He also uses “flashreflections” that means that he photographs existing pictures and deforms and defragments the picture with the light. He also manipulates the photographs in his darkroom.
Exhitbition at M Museum – Leuven – Belgium
06.10.11 > 08.01.12
