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The young Belgian artist Rémy Russotto likes to leave the objects of his photographies in the vague and the foggy twilight. In both series, ‘Faces’ and ‘Abstracts’, it is up to the viewer to make out what Russotto actually captured in his photographs, or to take them as an abstract composition of unusually refined and attractive coloration.
Driven by the conviction that nowadays photographs have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality, Russotto in his portrait series ‘Faces’ opts for returning to a more magical time in photography. He fabricates portraits of ethereal transcendency that evoke the softest pencil drawings, in which erasure is used to remove all but the essential.
Russotto reflects on the question of just how much information it takes to suggest a face. Even though on first view many of his portraits appear to be a solely abstract composition, Russotto astutely plays with the fact that human radar is acutely sensitive to faces and anything resembling a face is sure to imprint itself instantly on the mind. His photographs radiate the idea of the human face as a terrain or landscape with the less pronounced parts lying in shadow and the prominent parts exposed to the light. The character, personality or idiosyncracies of his sitters all seem irrelevant. Instead, Russotto achieves a total disengagement with the real world.
And again in the ‘Abstract’ series Russotto’s photographs confound perception, as our brains desperately search for or impose meaning. In this constant search for hints of the real world, we come across objects that we gladly ‘identify’ and locate in the merely suggested space. In their betrayal and bewildering ambiguity, the photographs ask if a space or object actually needs to exist in order to be photographed. Russotto artfully shifts the process of formatting a picture to the viewer’s eye which, following its experience-based intuition, puts the various ingredients together like pieces of a puzzle. And yet, the viewer is left with only one certainty: what he sees in the picture might be there, but remains highly subjective.
Russotto is an autodidact in his photographic practice. Born in 1976, Russotto has been studying Law, Philosophy and Literature from 1996 to 2000 at Louvain-La-Neuve University in Belgium. He participated in various prestigious group shows. The exhibition at Brussels Flamingo follows his very well received show at Brussels’ B-gallery (selected by jury from MuhKa and Bozar), as part of the Bozar’s Summer of Photography festival in 2008.