Hugo Roelandt — BODY & SELF PORTRAITS
©Estate Hugo Roelandt
Zonder titel, foto's op aluminium gebaseerd op ingekleurde zelfportretten uit de vroege jaren 1970 / Untitled, photos on aluminum based on tinted self-portraits from the early 1970's, 1993
"Misschien was die een experiment (in de wisselwerking tussen grafiek en fotografie). Waar begint de foto en waar eindigt de grafiek en omgekeerd. Waren het gekleurde foto's of fotografische grafieken? De vraag laat ik onbeantwoord. Het antwoord geldt als autonoom verschijnsel, het heeft geen belang in welk hokje het kan geklasseerd worden." Hugo Roelandt
– Lieve De Pelsmaeker, Hugo Roelandt, grafisch vormgever, Vlaams Weekblad voor Allen, 35 (Aalst, 1973), p. 7.
During his colour experiments Hugo Roelandt reworked some of his earliest work. Among them a series of six coloured self-portraits he had first shown in 1973 during an exhibition by former students of the Academy of Aalst. In 1993 he reworked these works and made them into large photos glued on aluminium plates which, together with a monochrome black photo and a blank aluminium plate on which at the bottom only his signature was engraved (it was at the same time projected as a slide), were conceived as an ‘aluminium book’. He showed the pages in the Antwerp Academy as his graduation project at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts HISK. Together with his favourite cactus plant (lit by a spot) and a large photo of a green elephant – a remembrance of his travelling to India when he was in his twenties and visiting the sacred Sikh shrine at Amritsar.
