Plastic Eyes

Faustinus Deraet's Treetops

Plastic Eyes

Faustinus Deraet's "Plastic Eyes" photography series is taken in black and white with a Holga camera. These cheap plastic cameras are beloved by the artists who use them, not in spite of but because of the unpredictable distortions and rounded shadows they produce in the periphery. These circular images are perfect for Deraet's work: He has a gift for examining reality in a meditative, universal sense, creating a sensation of existential awareness.

Time, a shot of a public timepiece framed against a clouded sky, is subtly enhanced by a pair of diagonals formed by power lines, reinforcing a sensation of motion. Another time-related image, In a Hurry, is an image of a striped crosswalk with depersonalized figures flowing across. An oddly distorted sense of perspective is created by the stripes, which are nearly parallel to the picture plane. As they rhythmically diminish with distance, they echo the ever-present distancing of the past. Bike Rack and Chairs play with the theme of motion and stillness in time.

Fountain of Abundance takes the series in a somewhat different direction. The fully modeled clarity of the central image, a font ornamented with a pair of sculpted twined fish, is contrasted with the flatness and blurring created toward the edges of the photo, so that a tension between flatness and volume is present, creating an otherworldly spatial effect similar to that seen in India's painted photographs. In the placement of pattern alongside illusionistic rendering, the picture plane is simultaneously asserted and denied.

The Buddha is perhaps the artist's most direct take on spirituality. It is a simple photo of a monumental sculpted Buddha against the background of a clouded sky.