KOEN LAUWAERT PHOTOGRAPHY

Silent introspection, the capturing of what is real, a perceptive study of the nature of the emotions, of the structure of the conditions of a context, of the sudden evanescence of scenic insight that is evocative of a memory, the revelation of a sentiment. Hence, Koen Lauwaert as the loyal pupil of the most realistic ’motet’ of the poetics of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s technique: “photographs can achieve eternity through the moment,” even though they are no longer executed using an ancient and noble Leica. Thus, the pupil of a propensity to grasp the theme, the moment, the motive, even beyond any possible distinction, potentially capable of being generated by the technical performance of the tools available. His photo-observation, the balance of the composition, the technical uniqueness, the instrumental quality employed—camera body, zoom ranges, lenses—and the meticulous, scrupulous, ingenious post-production confer to Lauwaert’s pictures the persistent epiphany of an aura that supports the results of his reconstructions, of the unfolding of his themes. Whether they are the photographic recording of a landscape-environment or of demo-ethnic or socio-anthropological industrial landscapes; whether they capture the expression of human apprehension, rarifying its intensity with the evocative use of black and white; whether they entreat the brightness of a bucolic panorama with the most generous width of the diaphragm or the sharpest depth of the field, or of a building interior, humble, peripheral, and umbratile, the gentleness of Lauwaert’s photographic eye crystallizes this aura of frankness, competence, and sensitivity that renders the object pictured, the subject commented on, the ambient described toujours, lucid in its own unveiling on the surface of the medium, whether digital or material. Wholly syntonic, therefore, is Lauwaert with the binomial: photography, light writing as discovery and invention, to which he adds freedom of interpretation and levity of style.