I like pictures that are strong: revelatory and fascinating.
That is why I am not feeling at home, neither in the recent development of painting, nor in that of photography,
where such images seem to become increasingly more scarce.
Both branches of the image production are trapped in a hopeless trench war,
in which they take opposite positions that cannot but drive them into ever new dead ends:
whereas painting threatens to degenerate into staged reality, design, cheap philosophy or empty revolutionary gesture,
photography seems to become increasingly mesmerisedby documenting or reduplicating the existent - however interesting -if it does not altogether lose itself in the solving of all the technical problems in rendering the real world.
Precisely the digital revolution opens hitherto unknown perspectives to overcome photography's much scorned dependence of the given
and to freely transform the existent world in a self-created, self-contained reality of a higher order:the world of art.
That is why I opted for the digital camera and digital manipulation,
and above all for the immaterial digital screen, lighted from within,that only completes the digital production of the image
- in the hope that a further development of the technology of the screen will free the digital image from its hitherto obligatory transformation into
a printed reflecting surface.
That is also why I refuse to subsume my work under categories like 'painting' or 'photography',
and why I unequivocally call my creations 'images'
- which has the additional charm of distinguishing them from all the pseudo-art
that may be at its best 'the art of ...", but certainly not 'the art of making images',
Stefan Beyst