Carl Uytterhaegen
n.d.
Untitled
[Mirrors]

Gelatin silver print
Provided by the artist - Carl Uytterhaegen
Carl Uytterhaegen, the known photographer from Gent once told us that it is unbelievable how many traffic mirrors there are installed along the roads in this country. Indeed, this part of the world looks like a real "mirror-palace". He added that there is "music" in these mirrors, actually meaning, "image". An image in an image. A stiff eye with the iris in a ravaged surrounding. This is very exciting.
 
Uytterhaegen has created a real photographic "mirror-epic". An extended family in which each member shows its particular properties. You can see such a mirror as a cut-out in the scenery, as a stamp stuck on an envelope, as a square in a square (the dream of the Italian painter Antonio Calderara) because the epic has been formed in a square.
 
Sometimes such a mirror becomes a phantom, even resembles a scarecrow. Each mirror leads its proper life. Some mirrors are shivering with cold; others are consumed by loneliness, just like people do. Spoiled mirrors are set up two together, a married couple, and are spying upon the surrounding, as a reptile does : in every eye another image of what is behind your back, a threat, an alarm, or simply the elbow of a road. Such mirrors feel obviously at home everywhere, in the open field, positioned just above ground level, high in the street, at an alley's narrow entrance. Oddly enough they make the surrounding more adventurous, even more exotic, anyhow, less dull. The artist (read photographer) is offered much more : one or other very effective composition or a pure graphic element standing against the informal background of a disorderly nature. The third eye in the face of a brick facade, or the watering glossy of a deformed mirror surface in the chilly loneliness of a village's Sunday. Transformation, mirror expressionism, making the surrounding world indeed more expressive, human and particularly more artistic. This is purely picturesque. Long live our mirrors !
 
FT
'De Standaard' jan.1982
 
LL/15838