During the course of his travels, both near and far, Jonathan De Maeyer gathers fragments of natural and urban landscapes. He records what he sees with his still or movie camera in a neutral, documentary style. The presence of humans in the landscapes is minimal but never far off. He carefully lifts the image away from its spatial, temporal and narrative context. Recognition al-ternates with alienation. The artist seeks to slow time, to capture a moment; but he understands that it is time that freezes his gaze and not the other way around. Memory cards and rolls of film brimming with delicate images attest to this vibrant interaction between the hunter and the hunted: who is looking at whom or what? The landscape seems to be squinting back like a consummate voyeur, a fully- edged character; a protagonist in actual fact. De Maeyer processes the images he collects by printing, cropping, rephotographing and copying them, by installing them on a wall or compiling them into a book. These various layers form a metaphorical relief of visual associations.

For Currents, Jonathan De Maeyer dived into his organically expanding pictorial archive. Here, he tests out images by affixing them to the wall in different formats and by varying the presentation techniques. The photo- graphs are primarily in greyscale, with the exception of a few natural base colours that serve as filters, superimposing an additional layer onto the image. In addition to photographs, he also presents video works that seek out the tension between the still and the moving image.

Jonathan De Maeyer (BE, 1994) lives and works in Ghent.

He graduated with a Master’s in Fine Arts from LUCA, Ghent.

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- cahier exposition: currents#7, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium

text: Melanie Deboutte & Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte