To be like Water? Exhibiting Artist & Artwork
Christophe Demaitre // Her
Her, 2012
C-print
60x130cmThrough water, where ones life began, fluid disappearance, to be reborn. After, the line of the horizon reached the sky, in wonder if one day we could fly.
Christophe Demaître is a Belgian artist who splits the year between Brussels and Shanghai. Despite popularity and a general public familiarity with his work, the distinction of focus between “painter” and “photographer” remains quite blurred in Demaître’s case. He studied plastic arts as an apprentice in Europe, most notably in Rik Vermeersch and Michaël Borreman’s studios. He currently works out of Studio Demaître, at the M50 art district on Moganshan Lu.
After moving to Shanghai in 2006, Demaître now spends half of his year in the city, where he first began to incorporate multimedia technologies into his work. He crosshatches the effects of personality between person and landscape. In the life and death of space, his work allows a chat about character. Through bifurcated exhibition, he often presents one half of his yearly life to the other. His work presents urban landscapes, from city skylines to restaurant-bars, and points a hard-to-see finger at the means of human incorporation within them. The role of a structure in the creation of a self-important space is somewhere in there, with humans to slouch and slide about haphazardly. How do we fit into this world? Ask him. He won’t tell you.
Demaître took an early interest in photographic research while also traveling extensively through Asia early in his career. With photogenic perspective, he began to gain recognition as a painter. Since then, he has baffled and dual-aligned the two disciplines. The work he produces resemble what you might called “little treasures.” Through photography and painting, he meticulously constructs obscured image. This produces a distinct hunger for information from the viewer. His work is academic and wonderfully organized, though withholding. In installations, he presents concise structures that photograph beautifully but can only be properly viewed from quite close. It’s all very domineering.