Posture Editions N° 5: Dirk Zoete, The Big Convoy

Posture Editions collects an extensive cycle of works by Dirk Zoete (Roeselare, 1969): black and white photos of scene images modified with pencil and Photoshop. These images literally serve as the backdrop for a succession of sketched transformations. In this way they seem to instigate a peculiar stop-motion movie. The fragmented way of working shows the design and the implementation of a drawing over time.
Are these images a sketchy scenario for an animated film or they are an exercise in scenography? Are these still considered photos or drawings? Subjects depicted are quite diverse: objects and tools, rough architectural constructions in impossible landscapes, half-realised shadowy characters, but also contrasts such as light and dark (black and white), or other drawn elements such as lines, shadows and spots...
The book aims to present this series as a stunning world of dream images that entail a story - and therefore as a whole can best be described as a graphic novel.

The black and white reproductions and the theatrical nature of the work also opens a hall of mirrors to historical artistic references: the scenery images from Parade by Picasso, the Triadisches Ballett by Schlemmer, the supremacy of Malevich, but also rarely-screened Westerns or novels like The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.


Architecture critic Koen Van Synghel provides the introduction to this artist’s publication.