Veronique Boyens

VERSION FRANÇAISE

“At A Distance” is the visual story of a unique and personal journey that Véronique Boyens made in 2020 in the United States in what was originally supposed to be a road trip for a new series of self-portraits photographed on site.

Her plan to tour the country for 5 months was cut short due to the invasion of coronavirus. The photographer found herself at a distance from both this country and her original plan as the country steadily shut down. She was clearly looking at a country thrown off balance, put on pause, frozen, switching off. The few people she encountered were static, in the close proximity of their homes, and would stare at her being the only thing moving around in their neighborhood. She had that feeling of being out of place, unwelcome, not serene. She longed for a place to be. She decided to reverse course and hunker down after only two weeks on the road.

Once in shelter at a friend’s in Maryland and with the landscapes she had made on her trip during that short period of time, she decided to use them as backdrops for scenes of what should be or could have been that she would imagine. She then shot herself, her minivan and her friend in the same conditions of light and perspective as those backdrops to composit them into tableaus. So, in opposition to her main body of work, this series embraces different levels of production. Unconsciously, she was narrating her wandering in retrospect in a figurative way.

This series also stands out from her previous ones on other aspects: 

* The artist invites a third person into her self-portraits, something she rarely does. This character plays a key role, it serves the narrative and creates tension in the scene, as well as the light and the threatening colors.

* The artist narrates her personal experience and does not intend, here, to play fictional characters. We are truly in the genre of self-portrait, unlike her other series.

* While she normally tries in her work to relieve the scene of any specific time or place, being anywhere and nowhere simultaneously, time and place in suspension, here, the time reference was unavoidable and the accessory of a face mask and a map locked the scenes in THIS particular time (the pandemic) and place (the USA). Like a seal of History.

In this series entitled “16:9 (Sixteen-by-Nine)” in reference to the classic cinematographic projection format, Véronique Boyens’s photographs are intended to be film stills of fictional cinema movies, like copies without originals. The artist plays various stereotypical female roles inspired by the American road movie genre of the 80s and the 90s. These roles, in her opinion, represent clichés deeply rooted in the cultural imagination, like America and its endless roads, its peeled deserts, its dark boulevards and its neon-lit motels.

One film in particular, "Thelma & Louise" by Ridley Scott, fascinated the artist as a teenager, influencing some of her life choices and driving her into exile in the United States for a few years. What sets “Thelma & Louise” apart from the great central tradition of the road picture -- a tradition roomy enough to accommodate “Easy Rider,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands,” “Midnight Run” and “Rain Man” -- is that, this time, the heroes are women, both working-class, both ready to describe themselves as utterly ordinary, yet both containing unexpected resources.

It is in this same spirit of scenario that she wanted to evolve her characters, through more frontal and falsely instantaneous images. Unlike “A Silent Theater”, her heroines here have a more assertive personality, have control of their lives and are more active. She wanted them to occupy space, the foreground, and their faces to be expressive, detailed and unvarnished.

Welcome to “A Silent Theater”, the theater of a world in suspension, where the players here, unlike those of Shakespeare, probably remain forever behind the curtain.

The theme of Véronique Boyens’s images refers to the fictional world of Bovary’s women; socially neglected, abandoned, rooted in a subordinate position to the world around them. The motivation behind her photographic approach is truly to excite in the viewers the need to extend the narrative, to expand the universe of the scene into the universe of their experience.

Her role as a photographer ends the moment the shutter closes on her completely manufactured scene. It is then that she withdraws from the story and lets the viewer take ownership in the viewer’s own way. No caption beneath the image, just the anecdotal signature of a self-portrait that is secondary to the scene.

Made in undefined areas and rendered anonymous for the most part, the artist wants her photographs to capture the stillness and the underlying characteristics of the place, of the time and of the situation. In that framework, the characters are always at the margin, off center, beyond the edge of the world. She wants their faces to be reduced to masks without nuance, almost expressionless, revealing the hidden mystery of human nature.

The female figures are in waiting, in reflection and in retrospection, or when acting, in the service of others. They quietly suffer their condition and seek to connect to an elsewhere, to a world without connections and distracted in various ways (in reading, in contemplation, lost in reverie,…). It’s like only their dreams can escape the frame. Unless the viewer’s imagination allows them, they may never move beyond the dream but will remain behind the curtain of their lives.

Véronique Boyens tries to remove all superfluous elements in her compositions so that a silence settles in. Replaced by the universal, she wants her pictures to reflect the widest possible social panorama. The few details she concedes are intended to implement the dreamlike tale of the picture or to subtly suggest meaning – which is not deliberate. So the stories behind the photographs prohibit any hasty conclusions but come back endlessly upon themselves like a residual dream.

Her goal is to make them simple yet mysterious, banal yet poetic, familiar and unfathomable.

A young woman.
An existence full of habits.
A face-to-face with everyday life, from the bathroom to the office, including shopping.
To search for images through the objects and mythologies of all days: make masks and adornments, funny, old-fashioned and disturbing.
To play hide-and-seek with them: hidden side, visible side…
To take them in the face, but always keep your face, do not let yourself be disfigured : tame the little beasts of everyday life and let the facetious imagination arise.
To live with the routine since it sticks to your skin.
Or rather to make it more livable.
To divert it to make its presence an opportunity for creation.

« À Distance » est le récit visuel d’un voyage personnel hors du commun que Véronique Boyens effectue en 2020 aux États-Unis dans ce qui devait être, à l’origine, un road trip pour une nouvelle série d’autoportraits photographiés in situ.

Ce projet de sillonner le pays pendant 5 mois va être écourté du fait de la pandémie de coronavirus. Le territoire baissant progressivement le rideau, l’artiste se retrouve rapidement comme “mise à distance” à la fois de ce pays qu’elle observe et de son projet initial. Elle est aux premières loges d’une Amérique étrange. La photographe fait face à un pays en déséquilibre, mis sur pause, comme figé, et qui s'éteint doucement. Les rares personnes qu'elle croise sur son chemin sont statiques, à proximité de leur domicile, et la fixent d’un regard inquisiteur, elle qui est la seule chose en mouvement dans leur quartier. Elle a ce sentiment de ne pas être à sa place, d’être persona non grata, et décide de rebrousser chemin. Elle fait donc demi-tour au bout de deux semaines de prise de vues et trouve refuge chez un ami dans le Maryland.

Une fois à l'abri, et avec les quelques paysages désertiques qu’elle a tout de même pu immortaliser, Véronique décide d’utiliser ces derniers comme arrière-plans à des scènes qu’elle aurait sinon imaginées. Elle décide donc, une fois n’est pas coutume, d’effectuer un travail de composition de tableaux en post-production. Elle se photographie alors dans des conditions d’éclairage et de perspective similaires à ce que ces paysages offrent et fait de même avec son minivan et l’ami qui l’héberge. Par un travail de post-production, elle intègre ensuite ces trois éléments aux paysages sans vie pour en composer des tableaux imaginaires, emprunts de son ressenti sur la route. Inconsciemment, elle narre son errance a posteriori de manière figurative.

Cette série se démarque de son travail photographique habituel à d’autres niveaux également:

• L’artiste invite un personnage tierce dans ses autoportraits, chose rarissime. Ce personnage joue un rôle clé, il sert la narration et crée une tension dans la scène, tout comme la lumière et les couleurs menaçantes.

• L’artiste raconte son expérience personnelle et n’a pas vocation, ici, à interpréter des personnages fictifs. On est véritablement dans l’autoportrait, contrairement à ses autres séries.

• L’artiste décide de figer cette série dans un espace-temps parfaitement reconnaissable dû à la présence du masque chirurgical (la pandémie) et la carte routière des Etats-Unis. Elle qui, sinon, prend soin de retirer toute allusion spatio-temporelle à ses photographies, veut à contrario marquer cette série du sceau de l’Histoire.