Residential buildings with complex, nested structures, a viaduct with a buttress made of flimsy boxes, an abstract sculpture-like configuration—this bizarre architecture that could never be built in real life is the creation of Filip Dujardin. He produces the images through the use of digital collage and photographs of real buildings. His images seem startlingly close to actual buildings. Often the “new buildings” in his Fictions series only reveal their artificial nature at second glance. “I am actually interested in the thin line between the plausible and the unreal,“ is how Filip Dujardin describes his artistic intentions. “By giving structures a historical patina, I distance myself from the way that real architecture is usually depicted today.” Having studied the history of art and architecture as well as photography, Dujardin has only been working as an artistic photographer since 2007. Nevertheless, today his works are found in the collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For our Edition Hatje Cantz the photographer selected one of the fantastic works from his Deauville series. On the beach of one of a well-known French coastal resort appears one of the “dream houses” that Dujardin would describe as a “high-tech structure with a low-tech sheath.”
