I A HAUNTED WORLD

JULIEN COULOMMIER I

> from April 30 to June 15 2008

Biography (in French only)

Julien Coulommier personal Website, here

Ever since his first exhibitions in the 1950s, the photographic
works of Julien Coulommier have greatly influenced the
development of artistic photography in Belgium. Through his
work as an art critic and speaker at conferences, and his
championing of international relations, he encouraged a
renaissance of art photography in Belgium and helped get
‘subjective photography accepted in Belgium’ (1).
His meeting with Otto Steinert, leader and theoretician of the
German Subjektive Fotografie movement, was decisive because
it enabled him to move beyond traditional photography and the
ambient academic milieu. It was through Steinert that he came
into contact with photographer and painter Serge Vandercam,
with whom he entered the ‘Images Inventées’ exhibition at the
Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1957. The exhibition was
a huge event, aiming to assert the role of photography as a
means of autonomous artistic expression, demonstrating
photography’s ability, like the other forms of expression of
the time, to generate non-figurative works.

Also influenced by the expressionist landscapes of the Ecole de
Laethem-Saint-Martin, Coulommier developed a more
experimental type of photography. He was very attracted by
nature, which can be interpreted in so many different ways and
makes it possible to ‘cultivate non-figurative art’, and
interpreted reality to create enigmatic, uncanny, even
haunting forms.

Coulommier gained international recognition for his personal
work, which also crossed over into Surrealism. His creative
period has stretched out over more than fifty years now and he
continues to practise his art to the present day. His work has
an undeniable poetry, both in the evolution of its language and
its great flow.
He projects his ‘little repertory’ and ‘little personal museum’
onto things he sees, distilling the quintessential. He aims to
abandon what he regards as the banal visual aspect of what he
sees by deforming it and penetrating the subject itself, getting
down to the spirit of things. ‘By focussing or falsifying, I am
able to capture a form that detaches itself and I can
retranscribe it by revealing what I think is inside things.
Nature is general, omnipresent, and has everything it needs.
You only have to try and understand in order to enter this
strange, captivating, world.’
He believes that the artist’s mystery and subjectivity have to be present in all forms of art.

When asked for keys to understanding his work, he replies that
like for all art, there is no instruction manual. There is one’s
personal sensitivity, which can be different from the author’s
sensitivity, but can expand upon it. He takes the Surrealism
movement as a sign of this, where the most banal objects one
could possibly paint or photograph create an atmosphere of
outlandish strangeness, to which only the spectator’s
sensitivity can find the key.

The exhibition at the Espace Photographique Contretype is of
black and white photographs, which ‘achieve a greater
abstraction while remaining closer to the essence of the
subject’ (2). But the exhibition shows how Julien Coulommier
is also happy to devote himself to colour photography.

From an interview with Julien Coulommier by Jean-Louis
Godefroid, March 2008.

Translation: Cynthia Colson

(1) From Julien Coulommier, Conversation avec Ludo
Bekkers, Gerpinnes, Editions Tandem, 2004, p. 37.

(2) Idem, p. 23.