THE THIRD EYELID

Nathalie Quintane, 2012

This text is the communiqué for the exhibition Oh Lumière [Oh Light], held in April 2012 at Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris.

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 Éluard/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 II 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.