Ann-Sophie Deproost

Ann-Sophie Deproost is a visual artist who practices a process of technical hybridisation between drawing and photography that aims to erase the limits that separate the two disciplines. A pictorial stroke that intervenes and re-signifies the photographic image.

 

His work should be framed within the critical currents of Visual Studies or the Anthropology of the Image, especially with regard to reflections on the gaze and the contrast between image and medium, that is to say, the different natures of the mental image and the material image.

 

The camera is no longer the photographer's only tool. The scanner, the screen capture or the appropriation of the found image have become common tools in the practice of photography. Deproost's experimental research incorporates mixed procedures of image manipulation, be they chemical, mechanical, digital or manual. Laboratory, table and computer. Also in terms of drawing, he uses pencil, traditional inks, different pigments and the digital printer.

All this and the choice of the final support, the choice of paper, photographic or not, its texture, its grammage, its corporeality, turns each work into a unique piece. A singularity that contrasts with the infinite reproducibility of photography.

 

A slow way of working, which adds layers of time and meaning to a work that does not want to represent a tangible and univocal reality but wants to be a poetic and fragmented interpretation.

The concept of the decisive instant is annulled with the accumulation of these material strata in the breeding ground of the image. A layering that refers to different layers of time. Landscape motifs and urban fragments in black and white are crossed by the drawing in a gradual creation, which incorporates time as the main theme. Time or its collapse.