12XU

 — Boris Achour

12th May, 2016 — 23rd July, 2016

Press release

 


Idiotsaintkrazy


12XU. The title of Boris Achour’s first solo exhibition at the Galerie Allen reads like a rebus. A sequence of figures and letters screamed out at the start of a punk song, suggestive of teenage energy with all its violence and desires. In the work of Boris Achour, personal and collective memory are superimposed. These “object-fictions” make up a puzzle where the pieces don't, at first glance, fit together. Each one is at once an enigma and a message. But when the rules of a game disappear it becomes possible to invent new ones. To set up fresh meeting points between words and forms through the use of subjective combinatorial systems. Icons, clues, symbols: Boris Achour likes to confuse the signs. By cultivating duplicity, he avoids the emptiness of annihilating authoritarianism and a unique truth, replacing it with the fictional murkiness of syncretism. A poetic strategy of camouflage that requires the viewer to take the time to decode or perhaps simply to accept the absurd side of these fragmented presences.


Tranquillement assis sans rien faire. (Comfortably Sitting Doing Nothing) A cool “cartoonish” Krazy Kat made out of pasteboard crosses its paws. At first, it seems like a passive posture, a preference for inertia over action. Sitting and doing nothing. Robert Filliou would say it was a poem of action. A poetic action. A poem in different acts. The works of Boris Achour evoke different relationships to time and invite an overturning of all that seems established, fixed and set. The “no” becomes “yes” and this positive inversion recalls the Spinozian concept of Conatus, an affirmation of desire, motif and leitmotif of the artist's oeuvre from the start[1]. What Part Of Yes Don’t You Understand? Bruce Nauman spoke of art that is “like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat.[2]” Boris Achour meanwhile offers both at the same time. Art and desire form one entity that produces action, movement and new relationships.


News From Friends.With humour and nostalgia, Boris Achour invites in the fictions of others. From the solitude of a studio, admired artists become colourful imaginary friends. Fandom. If the line between an artist and his work is often a blurry one, Boris Achour escapes definition through the use of figures of substitution. Using metonymy, synecdoche and periphrasis, he produces incomplete combinations. He is at once nowhere and everywhere. He is the scriptwriter, the director and all the characters, yet he arranges things so that we don't see him. Over the course of his “exhibition-episodes” a sort of antiportrait has, nevertheless, been sketched out. But the ending remains open; the cliffhanger will not be resolved in the next episode, nor in any of the following ones. Because the fictional eclecticism of Boris Achour endlessly reaffirms the plurality of desire, whose incoherences set up meetings and make us subjects. “A fiction allows us to depict reality and at the same time what it hides.[3]


Marie Bechetoille


 





[1] Boris Achour's first exhibition at Chez Valentin gallery in Paris in 1997 was titled “Oui” (Yes).
[2]
“From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that did that. Art that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better yet, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down.” Joan Simon, “Breaking the Silence: An interview with Bruce Nauman”, Art in America, September 1988, p.142.
[3]
Marcel Broodthaers, press release, Documenta 5, Kassel, June 1972.




 


 

Photo: Aurélien Mole
12XU
12th May, 2016 — 23rd July, 2016 , Galerie Allen
Photo: Aurélien Mole
12XU
12th May, 2016 — 23rd July, 2016 , Galerie Allen
Photo: Aurélien Mole
12XU
12th May, 2016 — 23rd July, 2016 , Galerie Allen
Photo: Aurélien Mole
12XU
12th May, 2016 — 23rd July, 2016 , Galerie Allen
Boris Achour
12XU, 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum,
32 x 32 cm
Photo: Aurélien Mole
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
News from friends (Marcel Broodthaers), 2016
postcard
10 x 15 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
News from friends (Mike Kelley), 2016
postcard
9 x 14 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
Histoire de la solitude, 2016
modified clock
30 diametre cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
Tranquillement assis sans rien faire 4, 2016
wood, papier maché, acrylic paint and melamine wood,
77 x 82 x 39 cm
Photo: Aurélien Mole
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
Tranquillement assis sans rien faire 3, 2016
wood, papier maché, acrylic paint and melamine wood
114 x 64 x 15 cm
Photo: Aurélien Mole
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
Tranquillement assis sans rien faire 1, 2016,
wood, papier maché, acrylic paint and melamine wood,
85 x 85 x 44 cm,
Photo: Aurélien Mole
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
Tranquillement assis sans rien faire 5, 2016,
wood, papier maché, acrylic paint and melamine wood,
73 x 73 x 37 cm,
Photo: Aurélien Mole
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
NFF (MB), 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
NFF (MK), 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
TASRF 3, 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
TASRF 4, 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
TASRF 5, 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
TASRF 1, 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
HDLS, 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
WPOYDYU, 2016
acrylic paint on paper on aluminum
32 x 32 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
What part of yes don't you understand?, 2016
engraved baseball bat
81 x 5 x 5 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour
Boris Achour
's not dead, 2016
Hanger
103 x 5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris
Boris Achour