crox 485 LENS NA SPINOZA, trio show at Croxhapox, Gent, January–February 2015, with David Bruneel and Colette Broeckaert.
Sébastien Bonin photographs mountains—not in nature, but in books. These printed images, already the result of a prior act of reproduction, are re-photographed and reactivated through the negative. The artist then projects them in a darkroom onto long strips of silver-gelatin photosensitive paper, using a makeshift dolly on which a photographic enlarger is mounted. During the exposure, he performs a slow tracking movement—a mechanical displacement that stretches, blurs, and destabilizes the image in time.
The result is a second-order landscape: a landscape of a landscape. The mountain, traditionally associated with permanence and monumentality, becomes unstable, almost ungraspable. Through the combined effects of reproduction and movement, it appears as something that cannot be fully captured—only approximated, translated, and ultimately altered.
croxhapox.org