Exposition

Gauthier d’Ydewalle. Noosphère

Gauthier d’Ydewalle uses the image to transcribe, interpret and synthesise the books that affected him by immersing them in a composition where the purpose of colours, shapes and shades is to express the deep nature of the literary, philosophical or poetical work that they contain. It is basically the same approach as that of a portrait painter; a book portraitist. We only need to understand that the book is not an inanimate object but, in a certain way, a living being. Behind the underlying idea of the living nature of a set of thoughts when they are presented in the form of a book, Gauthier d’Ydewalle’s approach is based on the philosophical concept of “noosphere” used by Teilhard de Chardin. This word composed of the Greek noüs, the spirit, and sphaira, the sphere, which has the meaning here of the word “space”. The noosphere is therefore the zone of reflective thought, separate from the biosphere or geosphere, respectively zone of the living and zone of inanimate material objects.

The publisher, artist and writer, François de Coninck, delved into Gauthier d’Ydewalle’s work and he writes about it in this way “... his method is to leave nothing to chance. All the elements presented make sense: each composition has its justification, each detail its meaning. Everything is meant to be language: nothing is haphazard in this game where the plastic form exchanges glances. The expression of postures, the arrangement of volumes, the trajectory of straight or curved lines, the tensions between textures and colours, the interplay of shades and light must make it possible to enable a system of significant relationships that may say, in turn, the essential of the extraordinary presence of these books, of their very personal existence and of their interiority. Gauthier d’Ydewalle is moreover keen to give us the keys to decipher his visual language: his valuable comments are an integral part of this work between applied philosophy and implied photography which renews, through the singular nature of his approach, the genre of plastician photography.”