For more than twenty years, Sylvie Eyberg (Brussels, 1963) has been selecting, reproducing, and reframing details from printed images, and associating them with brief textual fragments.
Her work relates closely to photomontage, and is increasingly associated with a broader theory of the image that continues certain practices of the Surrealists (Paul Nougé), the Dadaists (Hannah Höch), and the avant-gardes of the 1920s.
Operating through an allusive and discreet system, Eyberg’s images are characterized by the absence of a single vanishing point — the viewer remains, in some manner, inside a larger image. They balance fragments of bodies, objects, and spaces, and propose a narrative reduced to gestures, movements, textures.
In this world of shadows, reflections, and interlockings, the precision of the reframing paradoxically produces no definitive meaning. Instead, it foregrounds indeterminacy and mixture.
For her sixth exhibition at Galerie Greta Meert, Sylvie Eyberg presents two series of prints.
d’eux, 2004/2006 – 2008 is a series of heliogravures that directly follows the large red and grey silkscreen works shown at the Venice Biennale and in Brussels in 2003. Whereas the silkscreens diluted the image through extreme enlargement and color, these new works return to smaller formats and to a heightened contrast. Heliography, an early image reproduction technique, allows the blacks to take on a particular density and softness. The placement of the increasingly fragmented words is determined by their original locations on the page before being cut.
The 20, 2008 continues the memory of the printed source. The reframed image and the cut-up words come from the same page and retain their original relative positions. The strong presence of white in these digital prints corresponds to the missing parts of the page.
repeating you, 2008 is Eyberg’s first video, and takes the form of a short ‘ditty’. It explores the coexistence of multiple temporalities: conventional time, film time, dream time, and travel time.
