Biographie
Pierre Liebaert (°1990, Mons) is a belgian photographer currently based in Brussels, Belgium. He graduated from l’École Supérieure des Arts de l’image « Le 75 » in Brussels. His series, Macquenoise, was published by the belgian editor Le caillou bleu. Very often immersive, his projects are often long-term and devour him. Although they are mainly photographic, his series Libre Maintenant builds itself around an installation composed of a film, images, music, audio recordings and texts. In 2021, the eponymous book, published by L'éditeur du dimanche, was shortlisted by The Book Awards in Arles. For his upcoming project Je crois aux Nuits, he explores territories where fragile traditions are still surviving. The series introduces the Carnival cycle, starting with the bear bursting out for Candlemas to a body covered with ashes.
Présentation
It is to a strange private space that Pierre Liebaert invites us. The models who, responding to the announce he had published, wanted to pose in the intimacy of a close room, seem to have desidered nothing else than this brief face-to-face encounter with a photographer whom they did not know. No other desire than to be in front of him, to be contemplated, to abandon themselves to the camera, breaking a rule forced upon them by their public or family life. Posing naked and masked, revealing their imperfect bodies in antithesis with erotic photography, these men seem to have no other purpose than to surrender to the gaze of the other, to submit to it. The image produced during the meeting becomes then more than document than certifies it, it is a “photograph as proof”, a proof of their momentary freedom.
Xavier Canonne, Director of the Charleroi Museum of Photography