An Out-of-Focus Scan, part 1

In this publication, Anton Cotteleer shows how, by zooming in, cropping and enlarging, he manipulates personal and anonymous family photos from the 1970s and 80s, and infuses them with a new narrative potential. Every stage of the thinking and working process, from the enlarged photos, through the process of sketching, to reliefs in silicone and textile, and finally the realisation of the sculpture, constitutes a new manipulation and reinterpretation of the image. With every anecdote that is told, memories change; with every scan, different aspects of an image come to the fore. Every new intervention on the supposedly factual representation of a moment both questions the veracity of the medium and seeks to create a new artistic narrative.

The process of zooming in on body parts and skin quickly takes on a soft, sensual quality in the photographic images. The artist continues this in the reliefs and undoubtedly also in the sculptures, where fragments of bodies find each other. In a surreal, almost hallucinatory manner, he brings together body parts and objects, which fuse together in a sculptural manner