The word encore, as we co-opt it into the English language, most often refers to the return of a performer after their purported final performance. Regularly we are left wondering, when a performer returns to gratify her audience once more, if she had already pre-planned that return presenting the quasi-finale as the real thing. And hence the importance of the interim space and dedicated subject is now to be readdressed.
At times, what we are seeking may have already presented itself as something else. An accomplished master of ceremonies can lead us in the direction she wants, she asks us to search for something other than what we believed we were looking for. Boris Achour does the same through his art, but somehow we still retain the feeling he is playing on our side sitting next to us in the audience of his own theatre.

Placing the subject matter in a place so obvious that it becomes invisible is the technique and theme of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Purloined Letter which was later the example used by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to exemplify his theory of the significance chain, being the location and order of the most important symbols in our subconscious. As the master of ceremonies in his theatre, Achour directs us towards things he wants us to discover, sometimes hidden but evidently present if we are willing to look. The work is regularly a mélange of something known (comfort) and something unknown (discomfort). This duality results in the feeling that we are being exposed to something unseen but from within.

In a playful way the artist challenges our comfort zone using furniture and tools from the near past. Twisted in different ways, Achour encourages new meanings and functions, poses new considerations and elicits inner thought patterns. For instance, the modified base of his tall floor standing lamp supports an illuminated text that revolves around the lamp shade, inviting us to rotate around the light source, its dizzying corkscrew cipher both giving and resisting comprehension. Entitled Lalampe – the work acts as a nod to Lacan’s term « lalangue » signifying pre-language communication such as that used between a mother and newborn.

The film/sculpture combination of The Big Combo, 2018 has an inherent meta quality for the exhibition and Achour’s oeuvre as a whole as it acts as an assemblage of assembled parts. Employing both film and instructional animation techniques Achour oscillates between reality and fiction confounding us with a 3D animated sequence presenting an impossible construction of an instrument with an unknown function. Combining machine precision (possibly a weapon, a camera, a measuring instrument) with organic elements (possibly a twisted and knotted tree branch or even Lacan’s famous cigar?) and abstract in-jokes to his personal art history, the layering of references and objects form a dense cross-section for the psyche. A melding of normally incompatible elements presumes a kind of film non-reality neither past nor future accompanied by the reinforced physicality of the same briefcase seen in the film posed upon the gallery floor. Closed, reserved and foreboding, this object sits outside of the film alluding to the aforementioned instrument.

Comparatively more reserved but just as precise and deft, Papamoule, 2017 is a bronze cast of the empty space within an old smoking pipe case. The bronze does not replace the pipe but fills in the emptiness that the missing pipe has given us through its disappearance. The artwork functions when the case is both closed or open and this multiple existence enforces its duality and the complementary relationship between the solid and the void. The title’s play on words conjures many entry points into the work referencing the moule (French for the mould that this bronze work is cast from) and simultaneously moule (French also for the mussel – that intriguing mollusc embraced by its deep brown shell which is curiously similar in colour to the bronze now resting as the enveloped form), plus many purposeful sexual connotations.

Unselfconsciously between sculpture and painting a new piece in the materially democratic papier maché has a formal but loose presence. As a painting we might imagine it as an imprecise Mondrian, as if the colour and the strictness of form has slid from the tableau. Resembling now a type of imprecise shelf, the piece could not function as such. A defect or a considered image without purpose, the authoritarian severity of the modernist grid has been deformed with casual dissidence.

Achour’s fascination with language is explicit in LLV (La lettre volée), 2017. A precise reference to Poe’s short story, a child’s alphabet stencil is rendered useless as it misses one of the essential 26 letters. This orchestrated malfunction or forced factory second reveals the artist’s key motivations as the first thing you notice when you encounter the piece is not what is shown but the single element that is missing. Viewing this work, symptomatic of Lacan’s take on the problems of signification, meaning, and externally proposed opinion and truth, we consider the biggest problems, those hiding (or those we purposefully ignore) in plain sight are always the greatest in our psychic-subconscious.

An encore lies in the bewildering re-hanging of a work from Achour’s last exhibition at the gallery. Possibly the most puzzling work from the previous exhibition, ‘s not dead, 2016 raises more questions upon its return. A flaccid coat hanger, so relaxed it has lost its form, languors unswerving save its curved hook. This kind of seasonal return rebukes the idea of fashion and reinvention and proposes a pest-like recursion – like the mosquito you are hoping will leave you alone, the eczema you hoped would leave after adolescence, the recurring nightmare or those unshakeable memories burned into your unconscious. To the viewer the piece may resemble a question mark or apostrophe, the artist insists on referring to it as an exclamation mark, revealing his obsession with language and a sense of optimism and resolve.

The suite of works Achour presents in Encores begs us to consider both language and the importance of incompleteness. We begin with a misspelled title (why shouldn’t we pluralise a word that connotes repetition?) and we continue through works that fail to function, completely omit important elements and others that refuse to find a resolve. Rather than compromising these works, such eccentricities support and bring light to the most interesting parts of art and life. Through repeated insistence and the contemplation of that which hides in plain sight we return for this orchestrated encore.