Eric Bourdon - Blog
Hand painted skateboard ‘Vercingetorix’

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Vercingetorix

Original acrylic painting
Hand painted ‘Double Deck’ (1978-1979) skateboard

Artwork size : 6.69 x 27.76″ / 17 x 70.5 cm

© Gallery of painter Eric Bourdon
Lille, France, 2025

     With the acrylic paint “Vercingetorix”, the painter Eric Bourdon signs his very first painting on a skateboard !

     This hand painted skateboard clearly gives visibility and presence to the absent par excellence, Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix, the king of the Arverni, but the absent from the painting, appears on the skateboard surface all the more gloriously because he has no human features, all the more manifest because he remains missing.

     We should then ask ourselves reflexively what a discourse on a pictorial work could be. What do I have to say about a painted work if this work is never anything but the collection of its subject ? The very strange paradox that appears here is that the more the work is thought of as submited to its title, as a noematic collection of its very subject on the canvas or on the hand painted skateboard, the more the discourse that will be carried on it will be conceptual and abstract because there will be nothing pictorial to say about it.

     Indeed, what can be said about a work from a pictorial point of view if it privileges all pre-formation, all pre-conception of what there is to see ? There can only be an ultra-theoretical reading because once we have said that, in the title, the thing or the character appears more than on the wall or on the hand painted skateboard, we have said absolutely nothing from the pictorial point of view.

     Two solutions then present themselves : either we start talking about the object itself, and we make painting a simple means of accessing a sort of phenomenological grasp of things, or we interpret what appears on the skateboard, and we explain that what appears is in fact Vercingetorix, which amounts to saying that only a non-theoretical interpretation allows us to visualize what appears.

   Planche de skate peinte ‘Vercingétorix’