Boris Achour
14 Apr - 31 May 2012
© Boris Achour
Feu de camp Mikado 1 (detail), 2011
11 bars, chromed metal, wood, papier mâché, acrylic painting, glitter, melamine, mosaic
diameter: 47 1/4 in. , height: 9 7/8 in.
Feu de camp Mikado 1 (detail), 2011
11 bars, chromed metal, wood, papier mâché, acrylic painting, glitter, melamine, mosaic
diameter: 47 1/4 in. , height: 9 7/8 in.
BORIS ACHOUR
Oh Lumière
14 April - 31 May 2012
The third eyelid
Rambling through the city then uninterruptedly through a gallery – dubiously but gracefully, or maybe awkwardly but decidedly, the way Boris Achour does, dropping his work off without installing it – neither showing nor showing-off – slipping through an artspace (sometimes a place for showing and showing off) like a dancer in a moon mask – more moonchild than man in the moon – and seeing each exhibit as part of an unfettered outing, a stopover on an itinerary to be (re)appraised retrospectively, looking back on the details, the surprises, the marvellous everyday tweakings – the jackstraws campfire, a flashing beacon in a plastic bag, a nap on a neatly trimmed hedge...
So, a visit as poem? A well-earned rest? Angelus Silesius's “Rose without why” poem reprised by Achour in an earlier exhibition was not the rose prized by 70s/80s gurus and glitterati: this was an extraterrestrial rose, alighting where there was no one left able to recognise it, a creature thus cleansed of all poetic or scholarly or grammatical anxieties, a kind of wild yet highly disciplined rose-poem, cut up randomly but line by line, mystically antiquated – a rose-to-be.
The Eluard/Godard poem the visitor from the moon will read here is by neither of them: lyrically put to music in Alphaville, fascinated with Anna Karina's face and its transition from light to shade – a kind of hypnosis, a Fritz Lang reminder of the love/danger binomial – it too has fallen from another planet, brutally pulped by its fall then instantly resurrected by a touchingly meagre flash of brilliance.
We might deduce that the visiting moonchild's eye asks to be closed nocturnally at the Crédac art centre and opened diurnally at the Vallois gallery — or vice versa. The art of Boris Achour can be seen as on-again off-again, like the third eyelid whose constant blinking protects night birds from sudden dazzlement. Black Hole Sun evokes a “maybe-monument” to the never-made works that are part of a very real oeuvre. The shape of things to come can only be told in terms of the present; and the person best equipped for the telling is not the hunter in his darkness, but a dancer making the floor ring out on-again off-again, a tap dancer belonging neither to day or night, but perpetually between the two, endlessly oscillating as sound saturation and perfect silence alternate at the speed of light.
Oh Lumière
14 April - 31 May 2012
The third eyelid
Rambling through the city then uninterruptedly through a gallery – dubiously but gracefully, or maybe awkwardly but decidedly, the way Boris Achour does, dropping his work off without installing it – neither showing nor showing-off – slipping through an artspace (sometimes a place for showing and showing off) like a dancer in a moon mask – more moonchild than man in the moon – and seeing each exhibit as part of an unfettered outing, a stopover on an itinerary to be (re)appraised retrospectively, looking back on the details, the surprises, the marvellous everyday tweakings – the jackstraws campfire, a flashing beacon in a plastic bag, a nap on a neatly trimmed hedge...
So, a visit as poem? A well-earned rest? Angelus Silesius's “Rose without why” poem reprised by Achour in an earlier exhibition was not the rose prized by 70s/80s gurus and glitterati: this was an extraterrestrial rose, alighting where there was no one left able to recognise it, a creature thus cleansed of all poetic or scholarly or grammatical anxieties, a kind of wild yet highly disciplined rose-poem, cut up randomly but line by line, mystically antiquated – a rose-to-be.
The Eluard/Godard poem the visitor from the moon will read here is by neither of them: lyrically put to music in Alphaville, fascinated with Anna Karina's face and its transition from light to shade – a kind of hypnosis, a Fritz Lang reminder of the love/danger binomial – it too has fallen from another planet, brutally pulped by its fall then instantly resurrected by a touchingly meagre flash of brilliance.
We might deduce that the visiting moonchild's eye asks to be closed nocturnally at the Crédac art centre and opened diurnally at the Vallois gallery — or vice versa. The art of Boris Achour can be seen as on-again off-again, like the third eyelid whose constant blinking protects night birds from sudden dazzlement. Black Hole Sun evokes a “maybe-monument” to the never-made works that are part of a very real oeuvre. The shape of things to come can only be told in terms of the present; and the person best equipped for the telling is not the hunter in his darkness, but a dancer making the floor ring out on-again off-again, a tap dancer belonging neither to day or night, but perpetually between the two, endlessly oscillating as sound saturation and perfect silence alternate at the speed of light.