Bert Danckaert: Simple Present

In a specially written on the occasion of the project presentation Simple Present In the text, Adam Mazur states that "Bert Danckaert's photographs are part of the photographic discourse of contemporary art. Located at the intersection of the tradition of topographic document and abstract modernist art, Danckaert's photographs draw attention with the artistry of the form focused on aesthetic experience. This type of photography in Poland is relatively little known and for historical reasons it would be difficult to find analogies to this work in the mainstream of domestic artistic production. Wojciech Wilczyk in his essay on Belgium's photography draws our attention to the fact that "The ahistoricity and the peculiar asymptomatic nature of the locations photographed by the Belgian author are a very alluring and suggestive at the same time the periphery of modernity, whose shape, however, what must be remembered, is the result of economic and social processes of usually quite brutal and ruthless nature". Jan Blommaert in one of his texts about the project Simple Present He wrote that in Danckaert's work "we see a strangely familiar world of bland, unsophisticated places where so much of our lives passes; places that we pass without paying any attention to them; spaces that are just trajectories, a section connecting one place with another. In a word, these are the places that define our lives and belong to so many other people in an urbanized world." Blommaert also states that "The walls in Danckaert's world are a scene. They serve as signs of human activity, the impact of people on the urban space (creation of places of residence, public utility facilities, garbage; seemingly disordered layouts of objects that question purposefulness and design). Walls play a key role in this, perhaps they are even the only permanent and visible elements. Danckaert's work suggests that the layers of human activity are particularly visible in these strangely familiar geometric modules of metropolitan late modernism. 

Bert Danckaert's exhibition in Atlas Sztuki was created in collaboration with the Roberto Polo Gallery from Brussels, which represents the artist.