Pretending
She made the "Rock Scales" series using the "Wet Collodium" technique, a photographic process in which a light-sensitive layer is poured onto a glass plate and processed immediately. In this way, she not only takes us to the time when photography came into existence (circa 1850), but also to the period in which early Victorian travelers gathered images from around the world, who wanted to consolidate their conquests with this imagination. "Seeing is believing". Yet Devos' images are in fact scale models that in turn refer to the microcosm in nature and the oddities of the nineteenth-century explorers. A theme that was highlighted earlier in her oeuvre.
The choice to present the original collodium plates and not a photographic print is, therefore, the right form for this exhibition in this Italian glass workshop (s). These images of a rock formation on glass are only visible through the underlying presence of real matter, namely black natural stone.
These pioneering years of photography heralded the end of the ivory tower ideology. Romanticists such as Caspar David Friedrich, with his well-known work "The walker above the mists" (1818), saw the acceleration of society, the industrialization of crafts in black. It was a turbulent time in which new sciences and philosophies emerged. Just think of Nietzsche's “Der Wille zur Macht”, which deals with the fundamental driving force of man to dominate, to control, to roam and to rule nature. This steady evolution, at first sight, brought prosperity for everyone, but it is actually the impetus and cause for, among other things, social inequality, mass consumption and the current climate problem. And that is precisely what Isabel Devos deliberately raises with us through her art.