Galeria Omar Alonso to Present "Billboards, New York"
Photographs by Wouter Deruytter
Provided by Ambito - February 2006
 After being successfully shown at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, the series of photographs titled “Billboards, New York” by Belgian photographer Wouter Deruytter comes to Galeria Omar Alonso in Downtown Puerto Vallarta. The exhibition opens on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 with a reception for the artists from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.
Critics have acclaimed the New York exhibition. Anna Holtzman, in an article published in Eyemazing Magazine, wrote: “Manhattan is filled with larger-than-life billboards featuring giant models that tower over the pedestrian crowds. New York-based photographer Wouter Deruytter looks at these icons as though they were real people, snapping second-hand portraits of them as beautiful giants looming over the mortals below”.
The article also emphasizes the fact that all of the images in the billboard series were shot with a hand-held camera, which gave Deruytter the flexibility to snatch fleeting and unexpected scenes. In one such image, he catches a pair of hardboiled Upper East Side matrons passing in front of a gigantic billboard of Jennifer Lopez in a Louis Vuitton advertisement; in another, a group of nuns and priests are seen crossing the street at Times Square, amidst all of the glitz and lights, and with large pictures of lusty couples kissing and lounging in their designer underwear in the background.
 Deruytter’s images, portray passersby caught in spontaneous motion who appear to be acting out a choreographed dance. Though it is not an illusion the artist is conscious of, it may be a testament to his earlier photographs of professional dancers: He was, after all, once the photographer for the choreographer Maurice Bejart, and after that, for the Cairo Opera House in Cairo, Egypt.
It is precisely the fact that Deruytter’s subjects are unaware of his lens that makes these photographs so intriguing. The regular city dwellers walk past his frame, entirely oblivious to him as well as to the towering figures around them. The models, meanwhile, stare directly into the camera, but they do so unwittingly, having no idea that they are being photographed again months after posing in a studio for an advertisement. The metaphorical interactions between the two subjects are fleeting and ethereal, taking place for just one moment in the eye of the detached third-party observer. Deruytter’s city is one that exists only through the flattening lens of the camera, which collapses the real and surreal into a single, charmed dance.
This series of large, black-and-white photographs can be viewed at the gallery during regular hours starting February 1, at Leona Vicario No. 249, Downtown Puerto Vallarta. Phone: 222-5587.
Source: Ambito Puerto Vallarta Weekly Newspaper
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