Borderline
Paul D’Haese
5 September - 24 October 2020
Borderline is a work carried out during hiking trips along the northern French coast. Paul D’Haese focuses on the border between the built-up country and the wide sea.
Exhibition/ The northern French coast is marked by history: the Atlantic Wall, the liberation, the refugee camps. With this in mind, the artist investigates, in a non-documentary way, all kinds of interactions: the one between land and sea, solid and turbid, intern and extern, locked up and liberated. Paul D’Haese links these themes to the search for identity, with as an extreme case, the "borderline" personality disorder.
Three years ago, he conceived, for the first time, the idea of exploring this boundary line. Since then, he has been following a route, about 350 km as the crow flies, from Bray-Dunes to Le Havre. He crosses about fifty villages and towns, with his camera, first by car, then by bicycle, and finally on foot.
Borderline follows Winks of Tangency, a project where he only "touched" the surface, the screen, the wall, the border. This time, he perforates the borderline by photographing it.
As with his previous project, the exhibition is the subject of a special fine art photo box, which will be available in the bookshop.
Paul D’Haese is born in 1958 in Ninove. He lives and works in Ternat, Belgium.
©Benjamin Baltus ©Paul D’Haese