Willy Vandeperre: Prints, films, a rave and more…

Out-of-Body Experience
By Jefferson Hack

Originally featured in Willy Vanderperre – Prints, films, a rave and more…

Willy Vanderperre began his love affair with rave in the early days of techno, stealing nights at Kuurne’s infamous 55 club when he was 17. He was just another young, queer escapee from a small town in a rural neighbourhood finding his sound, his people and his style – a familiar story that was soon to take a legendary twist. In the early days as a fashion student at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, before he transferred to a degree in photography (which he never finished), Willy met Olivier Rizzo. Shortly afterwards, in the Witzli-Poetzli café terrace under the shadow of Antwerp cathedral, he met Raf Simons and the history of the images we see collected in the exhibition began to be told.

Willy and Olivier were Dirk Bikkembergs and Jean Paul Gaultier devotees, but as soon as grunge hit in the late 1980s / early 1990s – when Kurt Cobain stormed the café juke boxes and Martin Margiela launched his ‘Terrain Vague’ show – their personal styles changed. Having both worked as dressers for that show, Olivier and Willy eschewed designer labels and began styling themselves from second-hand store finds, living and working together.

Rave is a mindset as well as a subculture, a form of private utopia, a temporary autonomous zone – it could be a dance-floor or a Martin Margiela fashion show, because in the end it’s about creating spaces outside society that elude the formal structures of control and release the mind from over-thinking, or from thinking at all. Willy found himself in such spaces, with names such as Boccaccio, Café d’Anvers and Fuse – for him, and many others, these were likely sacred places of transgression and liberation.

Of course, drugs played a strong part in rave culture. I have never asked Willy about his relationship to drugs, but they were de rigueur in the UK scene, and I imagine also in Belgium: the sensory manipulation of acid, the drive and adrenalin of speed, the heart-soaring euphoric rush of ecstasy. If you got the mix of drugs and sonics right you could enter a tunnel of sound and light, the world would stop spinning on its axis and begin to revolve around you; time would collapse and there would be a deep sense of spiritual connection, beyond time and space, that is perfectly described as ‘the now’. In this nowness only beauty exists; even if there are apparent dangers, the darkness and threat of reality are kept at bay.

Willy Vanderperre – prints, films, a rave and more… is an out-of-body experience. Time is collapsed in the exhibition. Formality and chronology are eschewed, and viewers find themselves suspended in a web of images – a matrix of storytelling with its own personal codes and direction, where themed sections speak to Americana or Gothic, to masculine or feminine archetypes, to Mickey Mouse or logo-mania. Raf’s advertising archive is interwoven throughout the show. We bear witness to a body of work that is as much about the unique observation and aesthetics of Willy Vanderperre and the interpersonal relationships he shares with super stylist Olivier Rizzo and master designer Raf Simons. This is an immersion in an archive evident of a lifetime’s conversation between these three incredible minds.

Just as acid house and grunge radically altered music and fashion, Willy Vanderperre, Olivier Rizzo and Raf Simons, as the foremost image-makers of this new generation of Belgian creatives, completely tore up the rule book of fashion and photography. Like cinema, which can be read pre-David Lynch and post, there is a moment in fashion photography where Willy’s gothic-tinged surrealism, desaturated colours, graphic framing and fetishisation of skin mark a distinct shift in style and direction. We see it clearly in his photography’s heightened states of emotion and tropes such as the pan-sexual energy and sacrosanctity of youth held in his frame. Willy instigated a disordering of cultural signifiers that allowed for a new sense of freedom, rebellion, autonomy and power.

Willy Vanderperre has a unique way of conveying a sense of deep interiority. Let’s take the photograph of Robbie Snelders: a careful outline of Mickey Mouse painted on his face by make-up supremo Peter Phillips. Snelders’ stare and body language are languid and defiant, a ‘fuck you’ to the camera, but the trompe l’oeil speaks to a loss of innocence – the transition from naïveté to knowing, from a place of childhood fantasy and safety to a new sense of one’s place in the world and of its inherent dangers. It’s precisely this power to capture narrative and emotional depth that has always defined his point of difference in a landscape of fashion photography designed merely to celebrate surface, to serve and commodify but never challenge or question.

JH I wanted to ask you about when you began taking photographs. What was the first image you remember being really proud of making?

WV Weirdly it’s a self-portrait, something I’ve never repeated. I was 16 years old and it was my first studio-lit image. And I remember seeing it after the development process, and I was like, ‘OK, that’s kind of a good picture.’ I sit in a position I still use in my portraiture from time to time: a strong shoulder profile, a glare to the lens. Inspired by the Flemish masters. Now that we talk about it – should it be included in the show or should it not? Because it’s the core. In my head, this is not a retrospective, and the self-portrait, if ever on display, belongs to that sort of exhibition. This exhibition, I call it an overview, is more about capturing a moment in time.

 

JH You weren’t studying photography yet because you had enrolled at the Academy to study fashion. Let’s talk about why you decided to do fashion – what were you thinking at that time?

WV In my teens fashion was just overwhelming. It was everywhere – in the explosion of music videos, in the shows of Jean Paul Gaultier. And it was just so immensely tantalising, and so creative, you know? It was a man in a skirt – it was just everything. And then you had, all of a sudden, the Antwerp Six, which was very important – they were rock stars in Belgium. They would be in the news, on the covers of magazines. They also made catalogues. Ann [Demeulemeester] had beautiful ones and I remember Dirk Bikkembergs’, which were fantastically photographed and erotically charged.

 

JH How would you find them?

WV The catalogues? You would just go to the store that sold the brand to flick through them. When I was 15 I outed myself. I was flamboyant, obsessed with fashion and would save my weekly allowance to buy pieces from Bikkembergs and other designers. Apart from the Belgians, what I liked the most as a teenager was Gaultier. All of this convinced me that I was destined to become a great fashion designer so I started fashion design at the Royal Academy of Antwerp when I was 18, pursuing that dream.

 

JH And then you continued with fashion or did you drop out?

WV Fashion? No, no, I was a complete dropout. When I was doing fashion, I would take pictures, make mood boards – I was very good at mood boards! The actual drawing was more difficult. The whole concept of making collages… the research in books, finding the right information, copying it, cutting out pictures from magazines and gluing it all together. It was exciting, building a narrative in terms of my visual language that led me to photography and me taking more and more pictures. I think it was Walter [Van Beirendonck], who at one point said: ‘What are you doing in fashion design?’

 

JH So you dropped out?

WV Yes, I switched and did two years of photography, and then I was out. It was like, ‘What are you gonna teach me?’ I was kind of a rebel – ‘rebellious’ is a big word – but I was strong-minded or pig-headed, whatever you want to call it. I had my own idea of what I wanted to tell people. 

 

JH They were too traditional in their thinking…

WV And they were jeopardising my creative thinking, so I thought, ‘I need to get away from you. I don’t want to be here.’ 

 

JH It’s a common story. So, can you set the scene for me – the first time you, Olivier and Raf all met and started hanging out. What was that like? 

WV The story goes that Raf was having drinks with Olivier and a couple of other people in this little bar called the Witzli-Poetzli. It is still popular among Academy students and lost artists. It’s just this beautiful melting pot of people. So they were there and was passing by. I sat down and I had a drink with them.

 

JH You knew Olivier already?

WV Oh yes, Olivier and I met on the first day of school and we’ve been an item ever since. Relationships are different when you’re young – even though you are convinced that you have found the right person. I was a clubber, I wanted to experiment. After I exorcised all of my demons Olivier and I moved in together and the rest is history. But yes, Raf was there that night, we sat down, I didn’t speak to him all evening. Raf is this kind of person, I think, who’s intrigued by people who don’t speak all evening. The day after I passed by his office and we became friends. 

 

JH What were the first images that you took together?

WV I was paying for my student loan, so I had to go and work, but on Sunday, I would keep that day free, and Olivier and I would shoot – and Peter Phillips would join. We would have strawberry pie, and Robbie [Snelders] would pass by and we would shoot him. Robbie became one of my closest friends at that time. He would just barge in and we’d take pictures. Then I met Chloé [Winkel]. She and Robbie became my obsession. They represented youth in all its glory to me. Both vulnerable and strong at the same time. Both also had very good style. Olivier would have done his selection at Raf Simons’ office that was right next to where Olivier and I lived at that time. Nobody translated youth better than Raf at that time – it was just Raf, right? They would walk into our apartment, both looking great. Olivier would style them to perfection. On Robbie, sometimes he would just put some Raf on top of his clothes, other times he would combine something vintage-y with Raf. 

 

JH Can you tell me about the genesis of that Mickey image?

WV Olivier is a big collector of Mickey Mouse T-shirts – that’s from way back when we first met until today, a lifetime obsession.

 

JH So, this exhibition has all the work you and Olivier did with Raf, right?

WV Not all of it, but there is a selection of editorial work we did that features his clothing. I also included some of the advertising, which was always conceived intuitively. We would see the collection, and up until the last two seasons there would be little-to-no creative conversation with Raf about it. He would ask if we would have time and feel like shooting some campaign images for him. Of course, we were always happy to support the brand. We would treat the collection in an editorial way. For us it was a translation of an emotion. We never felt any commercial pressure. It was just a free visual interpretation of what that season’s collection was about. We would meet up for a drink or dinner a couple of days before the shoot and share the idea with Raf and he would reply, ‘OK, go ahead.’ Trusting us, which is very beautiful, of course.

 

JH You use the word ‘obsession’ a lot. One of your key obsessions is adolescence. What is so interesting about adolescence, and youth? Why does it continue to draw your attention?

WV Because they are the future, right? How you express yourself, what you do, it all finds its roots in your teen years. Next to the insecurity that comes with the search of your identity, there’s never a period when you’re more certain about what not to be. The initial search in finding your identity is pure. It is not being tainted by opinions and by other people’s influences. It’s just what you feel and that’s fine. Whether it comes as a dress code, a way of thinking, or just being in that moment. It’s fleeting, it only lasts for a very short amount of time before it gets corrupted. But it’s the purest form of human being in our life. Youth.

Entering the exhibition, the first image depicts a young boy wearing a T-shirt from Olivier’s third-year collection, facing the wall of the drawing studio of the Royal Academy where Olivier and I drew nudes at the age of 18. It had to be this image. Leaving high school, heading into the Academy where we started to fully develop our identity and create new families of friends. Into the first corridor of the exhibition, you are met by Clément Chabernaud and Julia Nobis, the teens that I have seen grow up in front of my camera. There is also Mica [Argañaraz], whom I think I have shot more than any photographer in her entire career. There are of course others, kids that I’ve met when they were teens, who were so beautiful at that time. Not only the physical aspect, but also the psyche, their personality and spirit. This is also an homage to them.

 

JH What would you say has been the biggest difference between photographing youth today and when you started taking pictures? What are the obvious differences that you notice?

WV I think the thing for me is that I am more conscious of my age. I think it would be very snobby and egocentric for me to say that I understand youth. Because it’s impossible. We have 30 years of difference, which is forever, so I think it’s better that I just reflect in my own way, on what youth stands for in the world that we live in now. And then there is a new language in gender identity – it’s so thrilling for us to witness that, how they make a stance and demand change. It’s no longer just a couple of people, it’s a movement that stands up and says, ‘Listen, this is us and we are not being pushed away anymore.’ As a photographer, I get to witness it, and capture it. That’s the beauty of them as well, that they allow you to capture the moment of change they are going through. With anyone that comes into the studio, whether it’s a model or a talent, the first thing I do is have a chat with them. It’s important to reach out and listen to who they are. It’s always important to make them feel at ease.

 

JH Talk to me about masks and obscuring faces.

WV Corruption is part of it and the questioning of identity. Even the Mickey Mouse make-up is sort of a mask, still trying to be childish but breaking that bridge between adolescence and adulthood. The pumpkin head, the whole dress-up thing finds its roots in horror stories and Halloween. I am obsessed with horror movies. If one comes out, I’ll watch it. Even if it has the crappiest title in the world. 

 

JH That’s so funny. That brings us neatly onto the film elements of the show; tell me about Woe onto those who Spit on the Fear Generation… the Wind will Blow it Back. Because it depicts a special moment. 

WV It was the first time that we decided deliberately not to do pictures but only video. All the other times I’ve done video for Raf it was to pull film stills from, never to use, the actual video. With this one, the film stills came into a sort of a book. But the idea was always to make it a film.

 

JH Let’s talk about the importance of styling in your photography, and specifically to this show. How do you wish to honour your relationship with Olivier, is it a collaboration?

WV Yes, it’s a collaboration and a celebration because it is what Olivier and I have been working on for our entire careers. We have tried to evolve but also stay true to the way we have worked together and the visual language that we have. Olivier masters fashion like no other and can tell a story through clothing. His mix and layers of information through the looks is mind-blowing and inspires me every time. Simply put, he is the best.

 

JH What do you think it is about Antwerp and Belgium that produces designers and visual artists who are so groundbreaking and, frankly, people with such good taste? What is it?

WV It’s a very condensed country. It’s Antwerp, it’s Ghent, it’s Brussels, and they’re not even 30 miles apart. But even though they are close, they’re each very distinctive. Each of them has their own youth culture, but they overlap. So, it’s also the mix. Sometimes one is at the epicentre of music or dance, it could be Brussels, and then maybe three years later, it’s Antwerp or Ghent. I think it also lays in our history: throughout history we have always been conquered as a country. This introvert, introspective value of the work comes from that.

 

JH If you could give any advice to your younger self, what would it be? I definitely imagine there being a lot of students coming to the show and being really inspired by the work. What would you say to your younger self that might be relevant to them? 

WV I think you need to share, that’s the thing. It is important. It will allow you to find your place in time, your place in the world and you will be able to express what you want to do and be.