Philippe De Gobert discovered Le Havre in the spring of 2018. He started off by spending a long time walking around the city and simultaneously amassing documentary evidence about the work of reconstruction carried out by the team of architects led by Auguste Perret.
  Back in his studio in Brussels, according to his usual modus operandi, he set about making scale models of buildings based on those to be seen in Le Havre. De Gobert says he makes scale models of buildings «to understand how they work». Yet in the Le Havre series, the model is not an end in itself, but a stage in the process of creating the artwork, which is the photograph. The artist photographs his models, sometimes from inside, then, in a reversal of the process of miniaturization of the world, he prints the photographs in large formats to recreate the models on a scale appropriate to the landscape, incorporating fragments borrowed from reality - some genuine, some fake.

This corpus, composed essentially of views of interiors or seafront landscapes, conjures up an imaginary version of Le Havre, captured in the silence and purity of its birth, and empty - although here and there unobtrusive signs of a human presence can be made out.
  De Gobert’s project gradually expanded. As a coda to the first series of photographs of a reconstructed city, he added an introductory narrative. Imagining the main phases of the reconstruction of Le Havre without feeling bound by the constraints of truth, introducing anachronistic details whenever he felt like it, he reinvented a possible history in the form of a «photographic tale». No longer in black and white, these new photographs, bathed as they are in twilight, are tinged with colour. As if resurfacing from an already distant past, these images dig deep into our memories and conjure up others - memories of a city razed to the ground, from which construction workers’ huts, makeshift streetlights, then lifting apparatus and the first buildings emerged, little by little. We cannot do without this reminder of history, De Gobert seems to say. These images are necessary because they imply the vast challenge to be met, thereby emphasizing the epic aspect of the task of reconstruction. The exhibition’s presentation of this new Le Havre series highlights its narrative aspect while retaining chronological verisimilitude.
  But De Gobert developed his concept still further. In a long introduction that seems like a digression, he reveals himself in what he calls «an implicit self-portrait through his enthusiasms». In a progression that combines scale models, plates of documents and photographs, De Gobert reveals his «highly personal slant on architecture, from the viewpoint of the marvellous and Utopia» offering «a choice of milestones in the history of [modern] architecture», sketching sections of his imaginary museum, where iconic modern buildings rub shoulders with wild (but brilliant) Heath Robinson fantasies unabandonedly and with a touch of humour. Here, De Gobert affirms his «playful, poetic approach to architecture, with its faux-pas and blunders, earnestly concocted by an artist, without the rigour of an academic or an art historian».
  «The marvellous in architecture» becomes this long introduction, which, in embracing the totally subjective milestones in a history of architecture as told by Philippe De Gobert, identifies Perret’s Le Havre belonging to this imaginary museum. But for the first time, the breadth and profusion of the subject has led the artist to develop what he has to say in the form of a narrative, the «photographic tale» as a possible history of the rebirth of Le Havre.

By opening up his imaginary world and placing Le Havre in this personal, poetic pantheon, De Gobert reenchants the way we see Le Havre.

Exhibition Commissioner: Annette Haudiquet, Senior Heritage Curator and Director of MuMa

BIOGRAPHY

Philippe De Gobert
1946, Bruxelles
Lives and works in Brussels
  «I was genetically programmed to be a painter. Very early on, I chose photography - the profession least removed from my preoccupations - as a means of survival. Kurt Schwitters’ oeuvre prompted me to give up painting gouaches and start making assemblages of various materials and objects. While I was discovering the third dimension, I was a sculptor for a time, then I starting making scale models of my preferred world, «artists’ rooms». Those scale models became the «models», in the pictorial sense, for my photographs and since then, I have made them specifically for that purpose. «
Philippe De Gobert is represented by the Galerie Aline Vidal in Paris.