A secret meeting with reality

At first glance the photographs and videos which make up Chloé Op de Beeck’s work are of mundane moments, usually deemed unworthy of documentation. Images of everyday life without confetti, champagne, blood or floating debris in the aftermath of an explosion. They show people sitting, waiting, taking the subway, talking, smoking a cigarette, loitering, resting, … Moments that we have forgotten are moments because they are too trivial, too ordinary or too familiar. But this is perhaps a grave error. Perhaps such moments are the real moments since the gaze is not directed by an event or tyrannical scenario imposed by a higher force.

When Chloé Op de Beeck uses the camera, the gaze is autonomous, it wanders carelessly, unbound by its usual responsibilities. It seems she is standing with her camera somewhere in the world, where she has a secret meeting with reality. By waiting, questioning and doubting, she captures instances where delusions become apparent and the pleasantness associated with inhabiting, habituating and habits is stripped of its self-evidence.

In her images the architecture often resembles a decor. She reveals how in such an environment actions and attitudes change as if they are being directed by forces emanating from the architecture and vice versa; how the environment is influenced and transformed, by people, into decors destined to serve a narrative. She exhibits moments where reality reveals itself as a decor or scripted environment. Images showing reality as a naked, almost abstract concept, clarify that language and imposed narratives are as naked as existence itself. Both coincide as it were.

The works of Chloé Op de Beeck show moments where everybody, at one point seem to veer from their respective social, ideological and economic roles and fall back upon their individual existence. It seems as if the people in her images become briefly aware they are in a decor and, through the cracks in this decor, become permeated by existence.

While waiting she affiliates the meaning of the world. Not the discursive meaning, but the intuitive existential meaning. That which remains before or after talking. Her films are synonymous to watching silently. Mute. Something humans today are doing far too little.

Herman Van Ingelgem, 2016