gaze (6)
(Hasselt /Kapelstraat 53)
Pieter Geenen (1979 / Belgium) is a professionally trained photographer, but has stretched this medium by choosing moving images. His video pieces did not leave photography far behind. Geenens videos are in fact extremely silenced pieces. The artist registers a landscape in the same manner as a static surveillance camera or webcam. The artist thus seems to choose the same point of view as the nineteenth-century impressionist landscape painters.
On the horizon, in a barren landscape, the camera and the viewer bear witness to an industrial fire in gaze (6). In a predominantly air-filled frame, we slowly see the development of smoke and the light changing because of dusk. However, this is only secondary. Geenen is more interested in viewing alone; the delay and the minimal movement in gaze (6) allow the changes turning into something meaningful. Geenen even portrays elements beyond the picture guiding the imagination. We can hear the sound of excavators, a small airplane, a siren and helicopters, also recognizable as tiny marks in the image. The sounds and the saturated colour palette give the viewer much more than the reality of a slowly developing fire.