… 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].”

Translated from the French by Tara Mulholland

Notes
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