The annoyed idealist

What if a frustrated idealist was only a realistic dreamer?

We each carry within ourselves the image of an ideal world that surrenders to our desires, our needs, our hopes and our aspirations; in short, a world were absolute contentment is possible.

At the same time, this idea of “absolute happiness” is challenged by the reality that each one of us constructs in their own personal way. Faced with this reality, our aspirations to bliss are rattled, hackled, for, if ideas are readily manipulated, reality is much less.

From this point of view the photographic medium is at the heart of this dilemma: as such it has the power to confront us with reality: what it empirically reports to our senses. But it also has the power to show what cannot be represented: a certain idea of the human condition; what the Surrealists called the “subversive power” of images.

Through my photographs I strive to describe the confrontation of an idealist with reality, as he perceives it, or rather as he endures it, in a more or less violent way, but always intensely and without concessions. At times his difficulties come from the external world, at other times the realist’s own inherent limitations trap him into his own contradictions.

That is how I would describe this series of twelve images: spontaneous because of the liveliness of each vision, but also reasoned because of the methodical and carefully considered construction of each photograph.

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March 2014