Address
19 Rue Cervantès, 1190 Brussels, Belgium
BEYOND HISTORY
by Vincent Delbrouck (V.D.)
FINALIST FOR THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES BOOK AWARD 2009
Published by Bold Publishing (Amsterdam), 2008.
19 X 28 cm
210 pages
Print run of 1000 copies (numbered and signed by the artist) with unique cover redesigned by V.D. with his red and black marker
Offset printing on 122 Japanese Kasadaka paper, by Lecturis (Eindhoven, NL)
Including poems by the famous Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, author of Dirty Trilogy of Havana (www.pedrojuangutierrez.com).
An antipoetic trip inside another Havana, in complete and crazy family intimacy. A neighborhood, a bird in a cage, a girl with a cigarette, a dirty and enchanting autofiction.
« Then – and this is exactly when VD’s inclusive vision works its magic – comes a picture of a terrapin in a filthy, broken bowl. This is poetry and antipoetry (the facing page carries a poem by Gutiérrez called “Material Antipoético” – translation in the back). Everything that a consumer-driven society obsessed by perfection would find depressing and cheap and ugly and sad is made beautiful in its unbeauty. This is VD’s great achievement and his great love.»
Max Houghton - foto8 magazine.
Vincent Delbrouck
photographer
Vincent Delbrouck (aka V.D.), born in Brussels in 1975, studied visual communication at Ihecs. For more than twenty-five years, he has been developing a body of work that combines images, collages, texts and fictional diaries His work unfolds like a poetic autobiography, both intimate and collective, exploring the links between memory and imagination.
Delbrouck has explored two major locations in his career: Cuba, where he worked for twenty-five years, and Nepal, where he lived for a year in Kathmandu and in the countryside. In each place, his approach is deeply organic, imbued with his experience in the field. In Cuba, he has built a body of work nourished by encounters and sometimes surreal details, while in Nepal, he captures the energy of the city and the mountains and the inner transformation that it brings about. These immersions shape a hybrid practice that connects the intimate and the collective, the visible and the invisible, and manifests itself in colorist work that oscillates between still life and portraiture.
His projects have been shown in (self-published) books and international exhibitions, notably at FOAM in Amsterdam, the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, FoMu in Antwerp, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, PhotoFest Houston, Contretype, PhotoForum Pasquart, the Mulhouse Biennale (residency), and Huis Marseille. His work has been recognized with the Outset Unseen Award and he was a finalist for the Leica Oscar Barnack Award.
Today, Delbrouck divides his time between Brussels and Andalusia, where he lives with his partner on a finca inhabited by horses, chickens and dogs. This daily life close to nature nourishes his artistic research: capturing the flow of life and inscribing photography in a sensitive and organic movement.
V.D. is represented by the Stieglitz19 gallery (Antwerp).