Finalist 2016: Vincent Delbrouck

The Belgium photographer, Vincent Delbrouck, does not consider himself part of a photo-journalistic tradition: his body of work reflects an intuitive expression of his subjectivity, going beyond the moment and any kind of boundaries and preconceived ideas.

“The title, ‘New Paintings’, expresses my concern for painting as a source of inspiration for my work. I love painters like Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans or Peter Doig who use photos as models for their paintings. Painting is a slow process: a picture grows layer by layer, experiencing constant revisions, with its own kind of physicality connected to a magical hinterland. In my case, this relationship between painting and photography is symbolically reversed, reflecting the transition from the moment captured in a picture to when it becomes a timeless witness of a process.

By combining images from different places and series into a new patchwork, I extend an invitation to the viewer to connect intuitively with aspects of the world, full of beauty and shadows, and to reconnect with the profound significance of the environment to which he or she belongs. Objects, bodies and traces rhythmically flow together like breathing, opening up a chance for reflective contemplation. 

Collages from diaries or works on paper are used to revisit the box of archived memories, introducing another crazy layer so that the snapshots remain as part of a living process, with all its combinations and contradictions, which are essential to the biodiversity of my work. Selecting twelve pictures from my body of work to build a series with which to compete was, of course, like removing pieces from a puzzle. Consequently, the series presented here can only ever represent a fragmented sketch of a whole.”