David de BEYTER

David de Beyter defines himself as a photographic artist. Trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, he conducts research that is both documentary and conceptual through his silver prints and video installations. Captivated by a given territory, both for its physiognomy and for its human exploitation, David de Beyter explores the history of a place. He conducts his research through archives, but also through his own gaze, scrutinizing every detail until the landscape is exhausted. His work is currently represented by the Galerie Bacqueville.

In his series The Skeptics, David de Beyter explores the fascinating history of the Canary Islands. From the late 1970s, these islands became the scene of extraterrestrial contact experiences, attracting nearly 10,000 believers and skeptics to the heights of Tenerife. At the heart of these desert landscapes, nicknamed « Magic Places », ancient cave dwellings — once the habitats of indigenous populations — have been transformed into refuges for these sects eager for answers.

Are we facing an arid desert in North America, a Spanish volcanic landscape, or a lunar one? David de Beyter plays on this spatio-temporal ambiguity that disorients our senses. The amplification of yellow hues adds to this confusion by evoking the aesthetic linked to the aging of Ektachrome film, while the darker landscapes in this series, obtained through an occultation of UV rays, plunge us into an artificial nocturnal atmosphere.

Passionate about the world of science fiction, mystery, and space, David de Beyterdisrupts our perceptions with a disconcerting treatment of silver photography. By incising the negative with a fine blade, the photographererases a fragment of reality to affix an artifact in the skies of his landscapes. This alteration echoes theufologist theories, a New Age movement from the 70s and 80s that vehemently refutes UFO sightings, classifying them as optical phenomena or image errors.