Guided tour with Bertrand Hugues (FR)

Come discover 'Vivaces' by Bertrand Hugues and 'Barakei – Ordeal by Roses' by Eikoh Hosoe at Galerie Eric Mouchet Brussels. Join us for a brunch and a guided tour of his exhibition by Bertrand Hugues during the closing weekend of the Brussels Photo Festival on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 February.

Bertrand Hugues (b. 1967) is an artist who uses photography at a precise moment in his creative process, not as an end in itself, but as a means to question the very act of seeing. By defying the laws of nature, the artist also plays with the conventions of photography. What he achieves through his camera, using the Hybrides he has generated, methodically challenges our common modes of perception. This form inventor does not stop there—he chooses an indirect approach by transferring his Ektachrome slides to prints, entrusted to Atelier Fresson, the heir of the carbon printing technique invented in the late 19th century. The distinctive aesthetic of the colors obtained through this process recalls the early autochrome works of the Lumière brothers, introducing a sense of distance, as if a temporal veil were placed between Hugues’ hybrid beings and the viewer.

Eikoh Hosoe (1933–2024) was a photographer whose work bears witness to the collapse of millennia-old Japanese traditions and supremacy. After meeting the founder of Butō theater, Tatsumi Hijikata, Hosoe gained recognition in 1961 for his exquisitely crafted book Man and Woman, which transcends the art of eroticism through graphic theatricality. In 1963, Hosoe collaborated with Yukio Mishima to create the legendary album Barakei – Killed by Roses, featuring the provocative writer and propelling the photographer to international fame. In Barakei, Mishima—often nude—is alternately captured among the kitsch decor of his Tokyo home or in Hijikata’s deserted dance studio. Other images pay tribute to his love for Renaissance painting, particularly its highly sensual depictions of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Barakei is an erotic and morbid fable that, through its provocative allusions to Mishima’s homosexuality, reflects the despair of a brilliant, erudite author unwilling to accept the decline of both his country and his body.
Galerie Eric Mouchet holds the artist’s proof of this emblematic series— a unique and exceptional complete set, remarkable for its size, the beauty and quality of the prints made by Hosoe himself, and its rarity.