Geert Goiris: The Unreliable Narrator

According to a traditional point of view, photography is supposed to expose reality. The prints Geert Goiris (Bornem, 1971) exhibits under the title ‘The Unreliable Narrator’ — a selection of older as well as newer works — seems to invert this classic starting position: photography does not make an actuality visible, but rather indicates the inevitable human presence in that actuality. Each photograph shows what it doesn’t picture but always implies: that there is always a perspective, a narrative mode.

Goiris’ photo’s are in diverse ways saturated with a human gaze, which results in ambiguity about what exactly is being seen: a mud stream could be mistaken for lava, a cactus turns into a spider through association… At the same time, his work also speaks of a fascination with another, invisible form of ‘reality’, for the void that an impossible reality without the ordering human subject would leave, for the landscape unfit for living, the deserted, which Goiris searches in a romantic gesture, like an explorer. The photographer thus becomes a privileged witness of that big Other that transcends our comprehension.

But also in being a ‘romantic’ Goiris could very well be an unreliable narrator. Couldn’t the sublime he searches for turn out to be a rhetorical operation in the end? Not a real presence, but a mere visual effect? By leaving questions like these unanswered, Goiris assumes a paradoxical position between subject and object, between the self and the real. Out of the aporetic situation in which every viewer finds himself — a situation in which there is no absolute inside or outside — Goiris seeks to establish an order that is personal but also follows an inherent formal logic. This order is already present in the photographical decisions and compositions that follow from them, but also in the variable constellations in which Goiris hangs his images. In these constellations, each photograph resonates in other images, bringing to life a continuous visual language, a gaze that exceeds separate gazes, a ‘world’ the photographer has made his own. This world is not a transcendent order in which each element is a part of a big metaphysical machine, but an aesthetic order that testifies of the decision of the artist to attribute meaning to the signs that surround us.

Geert Goiris
The Unreliable Narrator