Greta Buysse

The timeless photography of Greta Buysse

Greta Buysse loves mise en scène, accumulating and associating, a hint of Baroque, tension, retro. Sometimes she cherishes apparently worthless things, but with a whole life behind them, and she integrates them in a work of art. With a cautious, groping sensitivity she often in an inimitable way records the timeless grandeur of locations with departed glory. Looking and finding are her great virtue, the patience of Job and technical bravura are admirable: Weather-beaten walls full of notes, paint which is peeling off and traces of time, man and decadence which can tell long stories. This is one aspect of Buysse’s oeuvre.
Another is the beauty of woman. Sometimes sensually provocative, revealing and concealing at the same time

© Thierry Buysse

Usually draped in veils. The striking thing is that when Buysse drapes female beauty or work on the skin, she is really sculpting. Love, life and death… Letters, feathers. Corks, cages, Magritte. Buysse associations. The lap of women who is draped and lying on her side. At first glance an abstract painting or a shining marble picture with extremely tense folds, but at the same time – the fascinating play of light and shadow in the slope – unmistakably a “lap” and never more feminine. In certain of her works, which are puzzled back together in framed square parts – which give the work a distinct dimension – on occasion Buysse plays with light so virtuously that her protagonists even remain visible in the dark! The white wings of a dark angel…
Furthermore, Buysse in her scrupulously produced tableaux – nothing is left to coincidence or one of her cats could unwant demand a supporting role – more than once betrays her preference for Surrealism, the fantastic. Work such as “Hommage à Magritte” expresses fascination.
More than ever, Buysse is in the foreground as a sculptor here. The skin has become stone, the woman now an absolute picture, made out of one big lump of clay through which a fracture runs over her entire body from her neck to her Venus mount. There is not only the unlikely presence of a third dimension, but also a play of lines, shadow and signs, white and black and above all capturing light: the result of an amalgam of acquired and combined techniques.
Initially Buysse practiced with her own writing. She was never short of a sharp, quick or sensitive scribbled note and as a result has a rich supply of hardly legible fragments of personal revelations. Now she succeeds in incorporating bodies in stone and texts for eternity, she writes fewer letters. Her photographic ability is developed to such a degree that she can entrust her inner stirrings to her work. No one can read it, although it is artistically immortalized. Looking carefully, the worn-out, empty chair tells a whole (life) story, tells more than people and letters could ever say.

Johan Debruyne