Bertrand Cavalier, born in 1989 in Tarbes (France), has lived and worked in Brussels since 2010.

Rather than following the classical tradition of photography, which captures the fleeting relationship between time, subject, and light, his practice is characterized by images that evoke tangible sensations over time: mass, solidity, and stillness.

His early work consists of black-and-white views of urban environments and Brutalist architecture, captured in cities scarred by the wars and violence of recent decades. These images, imbued with poetry and melancholy, belong to the same tradition as the cinematic wanderings of a Wim Wenders, while depicting a relationship with the city marked by authority, control, rigor, and silence.

More recently, turning his attention to his immediate surroundings, Bertrand Cavalier has worked with tight framing and close-ups of fragments of furniture or urban fixtures. These ordinary elements, artifacts extracted from their context, appear frozen and familiar, yet paradoxically “foreign.” Monumental yet on a human scale, they stand before us, occupying the entire visual field and demanding our attention.

To give these images their distinctive presence, Bertrand Cavalier chooses to work exclusively in black and white, using a smartphone. The laser prints—deliberately low-resolution and large-format—amplify the line work, the sense of mass, and the sculptural quality of these forms extracted from the urban landscape.
As an extension of his approach, he has also engaged in the creation of abstract geometric drawings and sculptures that he claims are critical perspectives, beyond their minimalist formal inspiration. Undoubtedly, Bertrand Cavalier’s work addresses our relationship to the world and the Anthropocene from a sociopolitical perspective. Yet it unfolds through an introspective approach that questions the inherent structure of its subjects, moving away from narrative and critical documentation.