Geert Goiris
The photographs of Geert Goiris (b. 1971, Bornem, Belgium) are not the works of a reporter. The Belgian artist gives few indications of the circumstances of their creation. His photographs – he still uses analogue and shoots on film – are not edited on computer. Goiris dedicates much of his work to the lonely landscapes which he discovers on his travels through the remotest parts of the world. He is fascinated by the infinite expanses of these regions, with their great heat or icy coldness, and also by their disquieting strangeness, their hostility, their melancholy, yet also their beauty; he came up with the notion of ‘traumatic realism’ to describe what they represent. ‘This term’, the artist points out, ‘refers to a state of mind at breaking point, when the tangible and the fictive merge together in a kind of micro-mystery and where the familiar is shaped by an alien presence.’ The enigmatic figure in the middle of the dust-dry plain in Blue Key (2003), which shows obvious traces of human beings, seems at first glance to resemble a fairy-tale figure on top of a pile of rubbish. In fact, it is an obo, a cairn piled around a dead cypress, a phenomenon of the shamanic culture of Mongolia to which travellers have tied blue khatas, ritual scarves, as a sign of prayer.