Dividing his time and professional life between Belgium and Brazil, Sylvio Perlstein has spent forty years meeting people, sharing friendship and weaving ties with artists, resulting in a collection of nearly a thousand works of modern and contemporary art. Here he unveils a selection of his photography collection containing some of the most emblematic pictures ever produced in the history of the medium.
The exhibit is primarily comprised of photographs from the 1920's and 30's after the fashion of Man Ray - accordingly, the exhibition's title is a tribute to the latter's book <La Photographie n'est pas l'art>, published in 1937 - used by the collector as a reference in his query for the unusual, ranging from the phantasmagorical to the disconcerting. From Hans Bellmer's print La Poupée to Claude Cahun's self-portraits in cross-dress, the exhibit reveals some of Surrealism's most beautiful photographs, also incorporating the movement's contemporary development with notable works by Vik Muniz, Adriana Varejao and Philippe Ramette. In addition, the visit is punctuated with non-photographic works by Magritte, Pistoletto and Bruce Nauman, amongst others.

This exhibition reflects Sylvio Perlstein's personal approach to photography and can be understood as a supplementary guide-line to the history of photography: a predilection for photographic creation presenting characteristics of the "uncanny", so dear to the surrealists, but equally discernable throughout his collection, all periods included.
Built in an intuitive and impassioned manner, the collection features neither portrait nor classical nude, but always spotlights a quest for technical experimentation (Rayograms, double exposure, photomontages...) and esthetic and iconographic marginality: the lens fragments, deconstructs, poetizes or eroticizes the human body; the face becomes mask; objects become fetish; space develops into passageways or frontiers....
Exhibition commissioners Régis Durand and David Rosenberg have chosen to categorize the works into six sections "Body", "Objects", "masks and faces", "Space", "Scene" and "Words" thus creating different and original relationships between periods and artists.
Surrealism as historical movement finds representation in the numerous photographs of Perlstein's collection; surreality and the phantasmagorical emanate from the abundance of images on exhibit. The "beautifully bizarre" or after Sylvio Perlstein's terminology, the exquisito is a new avenue into an ideal reading of 20th and 21st century photography.

The exhibit was first shown in Brussels at Ixelles Museum of Fine Arts in co-production with the Museums of Strasbourg (MAMCS).