Artist Statement
Robin Vandenabeele is a freelance fine art photographer that resides in Bruges, Belgium when he is not travelling or sent abroad for professional reasons.
He creates handheld double exposure photographs of architecture and landscapes with film and digital cameras. His photographic work is highly graphic and abstract and often manages to engage and surprise the viewer as it appears to show new interpretations of the reality around us.
The familiarity of the scenes combined with the surreal intervention provided by the multiple exposure technique offers a unique new take on common themes. The juxtaposition refreshes and gives new life to the landscapes or urban vistas that we often have become so oblivious to in daily life.
The photographer attempts to offer a new way of seeing the world around us by blending reality’s lines and forms into a parallel photographic universe. He explores our relation with space and the perception of our surroundings by rewriting classical subjects as intricate optical illusions that would not be out of place in one of M.C. Escher's drawings.
Every artwork is made by overlapping two consecutive exposures in the camera. Two consecutive exposures are made with a 180° rotation of the camera in between shutter releases and are carefully aligned by hand. The resulting images show where the overlapping highlights blow out the darker parts of the image, creating graphic shapes and morphing architecture and landscapes into new versions of themselves, giving them the ability to float in the process.
Carefully choosing, aligning and overlapping these areas of light and dark is crucial and is what ultimately defines the final appearance of the artworks.
