About
Isabel Devos
Contact
isabel@bluebirdbooks.be
+32 (0)479955104
Press
Isabel Devos (Ghent, °1975) studied photographic art at KASK (Ghent). After several years of functional photographic work in the theatre sector, in 2016 she presented the series 'Contemplative Landscapes' to the photography platform ‘Urbanautica’ and was named laureate. Subsequent attention to her work resulted in national and international exhibitions: Because it's in my nature in Paris in (2017), Contemplative landscapes in Venice (2018, 2021 and 2024) and That's how the light gets in, in Taipei (2020 and 2024).
In early 2020,Devos was a guest in Taiwan for a longer working stay. This first contact with Asian culture deeply influenced her work. Devos collaborated with Casa Argentaurum (Ghent), De Egelantier (Otegem), V&E art (Paris and Taipei) and Saskia Hendy Art consultancy (Munich), among others.
Laguna is Isabel Devos' first work in the Contemplative Landscapes series, which showcases her exceptional use of shadow and light. While the actual protagonists — the ships — appear as deep shades of grey, the landscape and the sea evolve from green — black to grey— blue and greenish grey to light grey. The play of the sun on the sea is clearly recognisable, while the three ships on the left might be hit by a heavy rain. Is the beauty of the protagonists — the ships — to be found in the darkness? Laguna is the first work, made in Venice in 2013 after long wanderings through the city, in which Isabel Devos explores the kinship between photography and painting.
Many of her works mark the boundary between man (made by man) and nature (created by nature). The development of the Contemplative Landscapes series as we see it today consists of several components: a philosophical approach rooted in the 18th century of the concept of ‘the Poetry of the Sublime’ and a cultural approach based on the perception of shadow,light and colour. These two approaches have played an essential role in Isabel Devos' work from the beginning and have developed further in the question of the boundaries between man and nature. Through two works, we will briefly discuss both approaches and their interrelationship.
During a stay in the Netherlands in 2016, Isabel Devos was so fascinated by the landscape around her that she started looking for images that refer to detraditional European landscape painting through the ages. The result of this first series highlights the photographer's love for painting. These abstractions of reality — sediment on ditches, algae on concrete, peeling paint, shells stuck on steel — visually question the willfulness of nature. This questioning can be traced back to the concept of ‘the Poetry of the Sublime’ from the 18th century: in it, nature in its power and immensity imposes itself on man to the point of numbing his senses.The feeling of the sublime stems from the contemplation of the infinite and the human striving for a dialectic with the absolute, such as emptiness, darkness, absolute light and eternity. Isabel Devos discovers this infinite vastness, seemingly uncontrollable cloud formations and overwhelming landscapes exactly in the places created by that same man-made industrialisation in the 19th century -places of inhospitality, edges of urbanisation such as port areas, subways of bridges, concrete piers, dry docks. Places that could no longer resist beauty and harmony.
The title of the work The wind rises refers to Studio Ghibli. The famous Japanese animation studio founded in 1985 by under Hayao Miyazaki. To get closer to the aesthetics of Japanese colour theory, you need to know that it consists of more than 500 described shades with the most beautiful hues and beautiful names such as red plum, cherry blossom mouse, cypress bark red, Rykiug green tea, to name a few. In Japan (as in China), colours are often defined in relation to a reality, a concrete, natural, tangible point of reference, while in the West, colours are defined by a scientific approach. From this wealth of colour ideas, Miyazaki has developed his own individual colour concept for each film - there are a few dozen of them - consisting of 10 basic shades: no more and no less. If we look at Isabel Devos' work The wind rises, we can see how much these highly differentiated, calm and harmonious colours on the bald concrete wall of a Venetian palazzo covered in fake and tearing colours reminded her of the colour composition from Miyazaki's film ‘The wind rises’ (2013). It seems as if Isabel Devos is trying to strike a balance between the concept of the sublime, which evokes in us a sense of awe, wonder and admiration, often associated with large, powerful or dangerous phenomena, and the concept of the beautiful, which represents harmony, grace and favour.
Isabel Devos' trajectory over the past 11 years — 2013 to 2024 — is one of questioning a European way of thinking and deeply engaging with Asian aesthetics and the underlying philosophy of beauty. It finally makes us realise that the man-made sublimity of nature, its enormous influence on us and the attempt to subdue it, as well as the idea of beauty and harmony in respecting nature, can be understood as a unity that can lead us, as viewers, to a kind of inner peace. Isabel Devos' work contains no mystical-religious value, is neither socially judgmental nor politically accusatory.
Through the means of photography — namely the conscious delineation by the photographic frame and the careful observation of natural light — she keeps the infinite, the uncontrollable, the overwhelming in check. She deprives the power of the ‘poetry of the sublime’ of its superhuman, its divine quality. Through the very careful use of shadow, light and colour, however, this imaginary manifesto retains its character, its power, its tension, its melancholy and solitude. Her photographs seem painted — inviting calm and contemplation. She has her works printed in a complex process on very fine-grained Hahnemühle paper, which was developed for painting watercolours. And so it is precisely this fine-grained quality that lends Isabel Devos' photographs an intentional blur when viewed from a distance. Only the detailed eye is able to recognise the precise contours and unevenness of the photographed surfaces.
Looking at it from a distance reads like stepping back. There, the viewer can unwind, can merge confidently into the landscapes. Isabel Devos's landscapes take shape as little sighs of nature, thieving with beauty, invite us to slow down. The algae on the quay walls and pontoons, the peeling paint on the ship and concrete walls,the silent witnesses of the tides. In short, all nature that, despite human attempts to subdue it, is now accumulating to the point where beauty is finally everywhere.
Saskia Hendy (Venice, 2024)