2008-22 I never promised a rosegarden
"Eddy De Buf's "I
never promised you a rose garden"
...is a project of
uncannily depth that I got confronted with in a medium that is known to be
lacking any depth: Facebook. And, when you let the depth of "I never
promised you a rose garden" sink in, even for just a second, it makes
total sense that it worked... perfectly! as random, unexpected, even
stopping-you-in-your-tracks during your endless scroll moments in a channel
set-up to steal your time, steal your attention, steal your appreciation away
from... value.
Eddy succeeds in bringing
us, the unsuspecting viewer, a seeming simplicity in format: a black and white
landscape (urban or other) and an image caption, nothing more, or? Everything
in the series whispers: 'or?', 'but!', 'could there be... more?'.
As a title, "I never
promised you a rose garden" was, is and always will remain pure gold,
rhetorically speaking, from Joanne Greenberg's semi-biographical novel (1964),
dealing with a young girl's schizophrenia, to American singer-song writer Joe
South's song (1967) covered by Lynn Anderson (1970) at at time that America was
entering the exit years of its Vietnam campaign.
Bringing a photo series
under a title with that much history, that many associations, while delving
into the intimate intricacies of an unspecified, undivulged relationship
appears 'telling'... but it is nothing remotely telling i.e. it
doesn't explain a thing. It creates recognition without even disclosing why
the viewer actually connects with mere fragments of diaries, conversations,
whispers and even shouting, let alone the landscapes never seen before.
Once you discover that the
landscapes aren't even real but heavily manipulated and the accompanying
captions are themselves altered texts 'trouvés' on the internet. The layers of
truth and untruth, make your head spin in a manner not only befitting the Belgian
surrealist tradition of before, but also the times we are living today of fake
news, disinformation, distrust...
Eddy is not stealing
anyone's time, attention or appreciation, he's giving, forcing the viewer to
stop, ponder, let everything sink in, with a mastery that embraces not only the
past - history, associations, general knowledge, savoir-faire -,
but also the ever present now of today's fleeting, hasty, mediatized mannerisms
and, most importantly in my view, a seamless merger of the two, making it
tomorrow's classic.
A charming, non-linear,
fragmented dialogue of a non-existing couple that transcends the then-and-there
as well as the here-and-now. Seemingly straight forward, but majestically not.
Not only would I buy the book in a blink of and eye, I would treasure it and recommend everyone to get a copy, to revisit over and over again."
- Thierry Mortier (BE/SE)
www.thierrymortier.com
www.kvadrennalen.se