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"Katrien de Blauwer’s collages are truly beautiful, and easily conducive to aesthetic contemplation. It is important however to understand the highly elaborate conceptual structure underlying I do not want to disappear silently into the night. The artist uses photographs from old magazines. She cuts them out in order to keep only the part of the image of interest to her, a part that she then pastes together with another fragment, gluing them together onto sheets of old paper. Sometimes, in a radical move, she uses a single image that she cuts out and recomposes. She thus creates elliptic narratives. The photographs that the artist appropriates for herself are removed from their original context — removed from the magazine pages, thus loosing the integrity supposedly meant to grant them meaning — before being re-contextualized in their new links. Collage as practiced by Katrien de Blauwer evokes cinematographic editing consisting of cutting out a piece from a reel and gluing it to another fragment of film for the purpose of producing a meaningful effect."—Rémi Coignet
Purchase Book
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| I do not want to disappear silently into the night by Katrien de Blauwer. AVARIE, 2014. |
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| I do not want to disappear silently into the night by Katrien de Blauwer. AVARIE, 2014. |
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| photo: Pino Musi |
Rémi Coignet is the Editor-in-Chief for the magazine The Eyes, focused on Europe and Photography. Since 2008, he runs the blog Des livres et des photos on Le Monde website. In 2014, he published Conversations, a book comprising 24 of his interviews with such photographers as Lewis Baltz, Anders Petersen, Daido Moriyama and Pieter Hugo. Conversations is available both in French and English editions.
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