The World According to Roger Ballen at Halle Saint Pierre

Published by Thames and Hudson to coincide with Roger Ballen’s first major French exhibition at the Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, France. The exhibition will take place from 7 September 2019 to 31 July 2010.

“Roger Ballen reigns over the black-and-white world of the human psyche.  Disturbing, provocative and enigmatic, the work of this American-born South African photographer, a geologist by training, expresses the sense of confusion of a man confronted by the nonsensical nature of both his life and the world in general.  Ballen’s work has been the subject of exhibitions at prestigious institutions for more than thirty years now.  Although each of his shows is an event, his decision to exhibit at the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, an atypical museum devoted to outsider art and unusual forms of creativity, demonstrates his freedom from artistic genres.  For the Halle Saint Pierre, a collaboration with Roger Ballen is an invitation to showcase – or test out – the artistic and cultural otherness of art brut.  In his relationship with creativity, Ballen has constantly explored a form of art that is rooted in the deepest layers of human nature; like the French dramatist, actor and writer Antonin Artaud, he is always moving towards more primal means of artistic expression. “

 – Martine Lusardy, director of Halle Saint Pierre Museum

“Drawing is central to the Ballenesque aesthetic.  Although elements of drawing had appeared in Ballen’s photographs from the start of the 1990s, he places the conscious realization of the importance of drawing to his work at the close of the century.  Although Ballen has worked with photography – a medium to which verisimilitude is intrinsic – from the start, the drawings to which he was attracted were neither accomplished nor mimetic.  They were technically unsophisticated, the product of the untrained hands and eyes of people who knew nothing of art history or the art world.

Ballen never learnt how to draw.  That is, he was neither taught drawing techniques nor did he seek to learn them.  His mark-making was, and remains, spontaneous and impulsive.  Indeed, his images carry a kind of primal force.  They embody emotion and convey a general mood – at times sombre, at others fierce and demonic, and at others witty and mischievous.  Although they are technically unsophisticated, there is nothing simple about the use to which he puts his drawings, nor indeed about their expressive concerns, which, for nearly two decades now, have formed the very basis of his aesthetic.”

  – Professor Colin Rhodes, Dean at Kingston University, Kingston School of Art, UK

Thames & Hudson will release the publication The World According to Roger Ballen during the first week of September 2019.