FREDERIK VERCRUYSSE

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From 'Tempo Polveroso' - Personal work produced during an Artist in Residency project at Vila Lena, Tuscany. 

From 'Tempo Polveroso' - Personal work produced during an Artist in Residency project at Vila Lena, Tuscany. 

Frederik Vercruysse's photographic work is an absolute joy.

From the architectural to the personal, his photographic images skilfully integrate a material clarity with atmospheric mystique. Each series draws us into a narrative with assuredness and quiet poise.  And the tones: I just can't get enough. 

See more of Frederik Vercruysse's work here. 

From B&B Shelter 7 - Apartment in Ghent by Belgian Designer Raymond Jaquemyns. Frederik Vercruysse

From B&B Shelter 7 - Apartment in Ghent by Belgian Designer Raymond Jaquemyns. Frederik Vercruysse

From 'Portrait of a House' - A photo project developed in collaboration with Buyse Seghers Architects. Featured in Architectural Digest Germany.

From 'Portrait of a House' - A photo project developed in collaboration with Buyse Seghers Architects. Featured in Architectural Digest Germany.

SPLASHING

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Splashing. Richard Serra, 1968.

Splashing. Richard Serra, 1968.

Richard Serra's 1968 work Splashing is one of those inherently evocative works which takes on new lives through the different media it engages. 

The process of creation is embodied in the work: hardened lead thrown against the base of a wall when molten. Once solidified, we are invited to reconstruct Serra's action in our mind. The violence of his throw is brought to life through the 'after-image' - his  performance embedded in the object.

MEMORY TRAPS

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Paris, l'Opera. 2010.

It doesn’t take much. A deserted street at dusk, with the summer sunlight lingering on the upper floors of a row of buildings and the sidewalks down below already deep in shadow, may get some old movie in our heads rolling again. Since we are ordinarily better at forgetting than remembering, it is often a mystery why some such sight has stamped itself on our memory, when countless others that ought to have far greater meaning can hardly be said to exist for us anymore. It makes me suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.
 - Memory Traps, Charles Simic.NYRB Blog, November 2012.

Paris is, and will likely forever be, my memory trap.

I think it was that way before I had even been there the first time. But it was our second time, although our first together, which hangs in my mind most often these days.

After stashing our bags at the hostel mid-morning, we snuck out and wound our way through the tightly cobbled lanes of the Marais. The air was crisp, with a cool blueness settling over the rooflines. I can't seem to remember anyone else being out. In my mind, the streets were impossibly ours.

Each with a white-specked brioche tucked into a brown paper bags at a quiet boulangerie, we found a place to sit by the canal. The cobbles were warm, and the roughness didn't bother us. Our teenage knees and travel-worn legs dangled. We couldn't help ourselves but to grin.

We were here.

Thanks to the Paris Travel Guide over at A Minute Away from Snowing for bringing it all flooding back.

PRINCESS OF WALES CONSERVATORY

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India Hobson via The Garden Edit

It all comes back. Even the dampness underfoot; even that brings it back. I was in Kew Gardens when I first realised how much everything yearns to grow.  I was just twelve, quietly sure-footed in the world. Afterwards we went back to the apartment, and it was raining lightly, and I stood in the bathtub with the white curtain pulled around, ran a shower, and shaved my armpits for the first time.

MAN CARRYING THING

 
 The poem must resist intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most neccessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite percieved

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of all secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

- Wallace Stevens


The sonnett and the last two lines which ring true and achingly clear: sometimes you can't deny the power of structure to carry forth meaning (be it in poem, or architecture). 


 Rene Groebli's photography (including Le Corbusier)