Eric Bourdon - Blog
The frock coat of the pope of Hautot-sur-Mer

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The frock coat of the pope of Hautot-sur-Mer

Original acrylic painting on linen canvas
Artwork size : 25.59 x 18.11” / 65 x 46 cm

© Gallery of painter Eric Bourdon
Lille, France, 2022

     The aesthetic contemplation of the acrylic painting by French painter Eric Bourdon titled “The frock coat of the pope of Hautot-sur-Mer” does not direct us towards the canvas or towards the figures which appear on it, but towards an entirely different landscape and entirely different realities which are the “represented realities”, “portrayed” or even “depicted” and which constitute, precisely, no longer the painting as an object of the world but the work of art in its aesthetic reality.

     “The frock coat of the pope of Hautot-sur-Mer” by contemporary painter Eric Bourdon thus invites the viewer to make this essential distinction between the material elements that serve as a support for an artwork (canvas, paint, lines, space, shapes and colors, contrasts between raw greens and celestial blues, acid yellows and vermilion reds, plays of light and matter, varnish, stretcher, frame…), which belong to the real world of perception in the same way as any other real thing and, on the other hand, the piece of art as such, which no longer has its place in the world but precisely outside of it, so that we say, in this sense, that it is a pure transcendent imaginary space.

Hairy hamster feasting on a broccoli

     It is therefore a question of knowing in what dimension of being the aesthetic object is deployed and maintained, what status should be granted to everything that may be the content of this specific experience which is that of art. We can only address the question of the meaning of the artwork and of the aesthetic landscape of which it is the space and the architect if we have answered the first questions : those of its nature or, as we could say, of its site. Should the pope’s frock coat be the ‘real’ frock coat of the ‘real’ pope, can Hautot-sur-Mer have a pope, can the pope have a frock coat and the frock coat have a pope and, above all, can the Norman village of Hautot-sur-Mer in Seine-Maritime, in its aesthetic reality, be located outside Hautot-sur-Mer ?

   La redingote du pape d’Hautot-sur-Mer