Alexandre Christiaens

“Fleeting wanderings of a traveler overwhelmed by the world”: this is the way Alexandre Christiaens sums up the story of his photographic oeuvre, and for which travel to far-off destinations is the essential condition of artistic inspiration and creation. Whether to Rumania, Estonia or Russia, or to India, Brazil, Chile, Turkey or China - or to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! - it always comes down to an inexhaustible urge on his part of “going to see”. To rub up against the world, question its structure, track its presence, plumb its absences, record its vibrations. To fragment time and to open oneself up like a diaphragm: to have light enter and allow it to be imprinted upon oneself. What emerges from these different photographic series – industrial landscapes, caves, seafronts, seascapes, etc. – are connections that weave together a personal and coherent sense of the world. For Alexandre Christiaens, travel and photography are inextricably linked: in this act of physically distancing oneself, something becomes activated that sharpens our acuity and heightens the attention we bring to the world outside, along with a concomitant realignment of our inner consciousness – because one must be outside to properly reflect upon and put into form and movement that which is inside.  In this way, the photographs that Alexandre Christiaens brings back from his journeys speak to us as much of the outside worlds into which he ventures as they do to his own inner world, something that implicitly permeates his images, mixes with them, overlays them.  "It is quite a precisely weighed mix – or rather an intense face-off between order and disorder," writes Emmanuel d’Autreppe, "It all has to do with the duality between material's density and air's lightness, between darkness and light, or further, between the state of profound silence and the frenetic activity of men and machines."

Text: François de Coninck