Oktober: Brussel [October: Brussels]
1998
Photography
Materials: ink, paper, aluminium
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. M00055).
Oktober: Brussel is a suite, a sequence of images of a couple, naked in bed. The man is aware of the camera’s presence and he looks straight at the lens. The woman keeps her distance. She turns her back to the camera and her face is never visible. The work is an intimate portrait of this couple, the sediment of a moment that is preserved, as a whole, as a cluster. At the same time, this portrait series is colored by the photographer’s eye. It is his look at this scene. The tension between the images’ intimacy and the ‘public access’ of the photographs is tangible. The work is also a color study of the bedroom’s warm coloration. Robert Frank described photography as ‘painting with light’. The woman’s pose also harks back to classical painting: it evokes associations with the myriad of painted recumbent female nudes.
