With ‘Nuits Intérieures’ Peter Waterschoot shows a selection of his book ‘At the Skin of Time’ (Arp2 Publishing, Brussels), published in September 2018.

Waterschoot starts from the iconic idea of the ‘Blue Hotel’ and ‘Neon Poetry’, and distils a very own colour palette from the microcosm of increasingly scarce two-star hotels, cabarets, cinemas and dance halls. For this he not only travelled against time, but also worked against the clock during the period from 2012 to 2018; a rapidly gentrifying ‘post-millenium-gap’. The locations: Venice, Hamburg, Brussels, Istanbul, Osaka, etc. are each other’s counterparts in the oeuvre, resulting in a warm and sultry but also subdued and poetic universe, which, disconnected from the real world, lives on, just like a memory or a dream.

In order to achieve deeper image intensity, Waterschoot lets time do its work in a ‘method photography’ by analogy with the Stanislavski method. His photo shoots are thorough retreats at carefully researched locations.

The meditative and solitary experience of the spaces was Waterschoot’s exploration in the Japanese term ‘Mono No Awara’, which expresses both ‘sensitivity to the ephemeral’ and ‘acceptance of the transient’. The painterly-photographic oeuvre therefore also functions as a travel diary, in which fiction becomes reality and vice versa. The feeling of inside and outside is also interchangeable (or complementary) in the images, as a suggestion of the traveling of the mind. Waterschoot’s oeuvre feels like a stay in an opium house; it is an inner chamber ‘nuit blanche’, a heterotopic ‘film noir’.