Just as a depth is in a way a surface, profundity also harbours superficiality. Our wonder loses its sparkle and our insights lose their urgency and even seem trite in time. Dries Segers tries to counter this process. What is dim, he glistens and what has dulled, he sharpens. Instead of visiting exotic spots, he rather dwells on barely or profusely seen elements of the social environment in Flanders and beyond: a bent and broken tree trunk, a clotted tea leftover in a bright white cup, a sun bleached door mat of a store and a battered and patched part of a road – the latter an example of his high esteem for anonymous forms of artistry.
In his first artist book, ‘Seeing a rainbow…’ (2015), Dries Segers captures these inconspicuous components through a rainbow prism. it reads as an accumulating colour code and allows for free associations across the book. Segers uses colour to highlight the extraordinary in the everyday, but here he is just as sceptical as he is lyrical. his aestheticism also serves to remind us of familiar crises: those of ecology, consumption and urbanisation. His gentle insistence that we see and address things differently, and do not slip into grey indifference, is expressed in fluid compositions that pierce through the prosaic and create a dynamic between surface and depth.
(Book images © malenki.net and authors)