Limburg
Lars Duchateau
Limburg documents traces of everyday life in the north-easternmost province of Belgium. Based on brief, anecdotal news reports of rather trivial events, highly detailed images were produced. The reports were compiled from the regional section of the local newspaper known as Het Belang van Limburg between November 2019 and May 2021.
The majority of these articles were pictureless, or relied on widely used stock images. If a story came accompanied by an image, it tended to have a fleeting nature. In Limburg the events, the textual reports and their visual representation enter into a new dialogue by capturing them with the slowness and high detail of medium to large format cameras. The images are often produced a week, a few months, or sometimes a year after the facts.
Duchateau is an artist who mainly works with photography. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies. His photos are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he makes work that generates diverse meanings, associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
His works are characterised by the use of everyday events in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role.
By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense. His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. He makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented.
Lars Duchateau currently lives and works in Hasselt and Ghent.