The series “Storytelling Walls” and “Light & Shadow” were recently curated by an international curator for the art platform Singulart. This presentation offers a deeper exploration of the works’ technical language, material presence, and the evolving possibilities emerging within the international contemporary art market.
How do you asses the artist’s technique in terms of colors, shapes, texture, and size, as well as used material, medium, and process?
Mark De Roeck’s Storytelling Walls and Light & Shadow series are realized through high-resolution digital photography printed on fine art paper, emphasizing a refined material presence that reinforces the contemplative nature of the work itself. In Light & Shadow, the artist frequently adopts the giclée printing process, employing archival pigment inks to achieve exceptional tonal depth and chromatic permanence, while Storytelling Walls is presented as digital print on paper. Each work, measuring approximately 68 × 102 cm, maintains a scale that encourages intimate observation while preserving the immersive quality of the image.
Light constitutes the conceptual and formal nucleus of De Roeck’s photographic language. Rather than functioning as a descriptive device, illumination becomes an active spatial element, shaping atmosphere through subtle gradations and tonal tension. The artist consistently privileges diffused natural or artificial light, avoiding direct illumination in favour of a softened and meditative visual field. Through this restraint, space emerges gradually, almost silently, revealing itself through variations of density, opacity, and shadow rather than through sharply defined contours.
His chromatic palette remains deliberately restrained, composed of muted mineral, earthy, and desaturated tones that evoke suspension, erosion, and the slow sedimentation of time. This calibrated austerity contributes to the emotional coherence of the work, allowing surfaces, textures, and traces of use to acquire an almost tactile presence.
Equally significant is De Roeck’s refusal of excessive digital intervention. The artist preserves the integrity of the photographed environment, maintaining a close fidelity to the conditions encountered on site. Technical precision is therefore never employed for spectacle or formal virtuosity; instead, it operates in service of a fragile and understated poetics, where photography becomes an instrument of attentiveness capable of revealing the silent dignity embedded within ordinary and disappearing spaces.
What is the strenght of the portfolio?
The visual poetics developed by Mark De Roeck may initially evoke Marc Augé’s theory of the “non-places”; however, within this body of work a significant conceptual displacement emerges. If, for Augé, non-places are spaces of transit — highways, airports, stations, waiting halls — defined by circulation, anonymity, and the temporary nature of human relations, De Roeck instead turns his attention toward what might be described as “no-longer-places”: environments whose original function has dissolved and where human presence persists only as a residual trace, an echo suspended in time.
In these interrupted and fragile spaces, the artist does not pursue documentary denunciation. Rather, he performs an act of aesthetic restitution, a silent resistance against oblivion in which abandonment is transformed into visual language and erosion becomes form. Peeling walls, worn surfaces touched by light, accidental geometries of shadow, and traces left by anonymous passages become elements of a contemplative vocabulary through which time itself acquires material presence.
Impermanence, in De Roeck’s work, is never merely descriptive. It becomes a condition through which photography momentarily suspends the inevitable disappearance of things, withdrawing them — however briefly — from the uninterrupted flow of becoming. His images inhabit a state of temporal suspension in which absence acquires density and silence becomes almost architectural. The aestheticization of abandonment is therefore neither decorative nor nostalgic; it unfolds instead as a restrained meditation governed by an ethics of transience and by a subtle melancholy born from the recognition of beauty precisely at the moment of its fading.
In this regard, his practice resonates with the sensibility of Japanese wabi-sabi, where fragility, incompleteness, and erosion are understood not as loss, but as conditions of poetic revelation. De Roeck’s photographic precision restores dignity to neglected surfaces and anonymous structures, opposing the visual indifference of contemporary culture through an attentive and almost ethical gaze.
If Augé’s non-places found a sonic counterpart in the ambient compositions of Brian Eno — conceived as suspended architectures of calm and contemplative drift — De Roeck’s “no-longer-places” seem closer to the unresolved emotional landscapes of Aphex Twin, particularly in works such as Rhubarb or Aisatsana, where beauty emerges inseparable from waiting, distance, and latent unease. Within these images, stillness never resolves into peace; it remains charged with the quiet tension of disappearance.
De Roeck appears profoundly aware of beauty in its fleeting culmination, echoing the melancholic consciousness already expressed by Lorenzo de' Medici in the late fifteenth century:
“How beautiful is youth that flies so fast!
Be happy if you will, for of tomorrow there is no certainty.”
In his visual universe, beauty never coincides with permanence or completion. It manifests instead within erosion itself, within that threshold where splendour already contains the premonition of decline. In this sense, his sensibility also recalls the haiku of Matsuo Bashō, where beauty remains implicit, emerging only through absence, silence, and what has already begun to disappear: "This road - no one walks it now, autmn evening"
Where does the reviewer see the possibility for improvement?
A compelling direction for Mark De Roeck’s artistic development could lie in the further expansion of his thematic cycles, approaching liminality not solely as a spatial condition, but as an existential metaphor — a suspended territory between presence and absence, remembrance and erasure. Within this perspective, his images possess the capacity to transcend documentation and become meditations on the fragile persistence of memory within contemporary space.
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A deeper engagement with notions of decay, impermanence, and transience could further intensify the emotional and ethical resonance of his work. In this sense, the photographic act becomes more than observation; it transforms into a subtle form of resistance against disappearance, preserving traces of what is gradually fading from collective perception.
His rigorous and measured visual language already reveals a strong anthropological sensitivity toward inhabited and abandoned environments alike. By further emphasizing this awareness, his practice could open new reflections on the ways in which time inscribes itself onto landscapes, objects, and architectures, continuously reshaping their meaning and emotional presence.
Who or what can you follow and study, or get inspiration from?
Mark De Roeck’s practice could enter into a particularly compelling dialogue with the work of Luigi Ghirri, whose subtle transformation of urban and peripheral landscapes into poetic meditations on space, memory, and perception resonates closely with the sensibility present in his images. Such a reference situates his work within a lineage of photography that privileges atmosphere, quiet observation, and the evocative potential of the everyday.
On a theoretical level, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren offers a meaningful conceptual framework through which to further articulate the qualities already emerging in his visual language: an attention to impermanence, restraint, fragility, and the poetics of reduction. These references could deepen the intellectual and aesthetic positioning of his practice while reinforcing the understated coherence that defines his photographic approach.
Finally, what would be the one piece of advice you would give this artist, regarding the objective of this review?
To further strengthen his position within contemporary European photography, the artist would benefit from continuing to develop ambitious solo exhibitions while actively engaging with high-level photographic festivals, competitions, and international platforms. Broadening his curatorial and institutional network beyond national borders could significantly expand the visibility and circulation of his work. By sustaining this trajectory, he has the potential to establish an even more distinctive and recognized voice within the broader landscape of contemporary photography.
Mark De Roeck is a photographer whose passion for imagery began during his studies in graphic design and advertising. From the start, he focused on photography and, together with friends, established a studio where he experimented with lighting for black-and-white photos. His professional career began as an artistic director at an advertising agency, where he collaborated with various photographers specializing in different fields, such as fashion, interior design, architecture, and packaging design. This experience fueled his fascination with creating the right atmosphere and lighting for every subject.Over time, his interest in landscapes grew thanks to his travels through Central and North America and Australia. These explorations broadened his perspective and led him to view people not only as photographic subjects but also as elements integrated into specific situations. Mark De Roeck continues to combine his expertise in lighting with a fresh perspective on the interaction between individuals and their environment, creating images that capture unique moments and moods.
