Summary

After a career in telecommunications I decided to dedicate myself to what has been a passion since childhood: photography. I took my first images at the age of eight and at fourteen I learned the basics of laboratory work in the darkroom of my grandmother, a filmmaker and photographer herself. A year spent for studies in the United States provided me with the opportunity to take courses with professional photographers and above all to learn how to observe. It was the visual experience of a blurred photograph taken from a moving vehicle during a vacation in Turkey that revealed to me the path to follow: to become an artist. I was forty years old, the age of mid-life, a period of questioning and reorientation of existence according to new priorities.

Without superstition or esotericism, I often reflect on what I consider as near-death experiences, which were the consequence of important health problems during my childhood. Are these experiences the reason for my desire to transgress frontiers and my longing to capture the vital force of light and colours, which I perceive as ever changing around me? I remember intense luminous impressions that procured a profound state of well-being, after having spent three days in a coma. A state of plenitude that I intend to seize and reveal in images loaded with emotion, in spite of being devoid of figuration.

Being positive and sharing this enthusiasm for life are essential to me because I am of an optimistic nature and I appreciate social contact and dialogue. Life is permanent flow and movement, but also transgression of frontiers and established rules. Why “Tracker of Lights”? To “track” symbolizes the state of perpetual vigilance, being a researcher turned to the future, constantly testing the boundaries of existing limits and frontiers.

Among the main foundations of my work are the conscious and the unconscious. Indeed, while taking a picture I pass from one mental state to another, from a preconceived idea or an object to an uncontrolled gesture, my body involved in a sequence of movements during which I forget myself and become guided by my emotions. I also forget the rules of photography and play with the taboos of the technique: blurring due to long exposure and movement that are proscribed by the classical approach of photography are the very essence of my work.

I am also fascinated by the borders between photography and painting. Even if photography is my main artistic tool, I perceive myself more as a painter and wish to further develop this affinity in the future. I would also like to reach out to the frontiers between photography and other artistic media such as sculpture, and to use new supports for my images such as aluminium, copper and Plexiglass, in addition to paper and enamel plate.

I also have a keen interest in the interplay between art and technology, such as the different states of light. Besides natural light, I explore unexpected artificial sources of light.

Although based on intuition and on the unconscious, my approach of photography resembles the empirical work of a researcher who progressively advances by small steps into new territories.

Yves Ullens