My name is Robin Vandenabeele, I was born in Bruges, Belgium in 1977 and I am a lens-based artist having a lot of fun with multiple exposure photography.
I compose using multiple exposures to create photographs that play with recognition and alienation, revealing the richness and complexity of reality.
When I find myself in a new environment, I love nothing more than getting lost, exploring, and documenting. During one of my wanderings in London, I started making double exposures with a simple plastic camera. One of the prints from that roll of film surprised me so much that I immediately went outside to continue shooting. I never really stopped.
The concept for a photo takes shape as I look around my surroundings. First, lines and shapes catch my eye, then I look for the light and shadows that will carry the image. When those come together, I point my camera and take the photos, handheld. I mainly work with multiple exposures: the first shot captures a basic image, the next ones erase parts of it, creating a new composition each time.
I create photography that questions and reconstructs our reality and responds to our brain's reflex to quickly interpret and complete images. My works first invite us to engage with recognizable forms, but immediately undermine that recognition with impossible combinations. A pleasant tension arises between reality and imagination, inviting the viewer to look deeper and let themselves be carried away by shapes and lines in order to decipher the layers.
What I want to convey is that there is room for wonder when we just look deep enough.
I mostly use a Pentax K1 full frame camera and large aperture lenses to capture my scenes. I find that their combined image quality contributes greatly to the quality of my work.
