Eric Bourdon - Blog
Curatorial speculations on the art of nothing

Zoom on the painting

Curatorial speculations on the art of nothing at all
when the weather is nice and we would rather go play outside
(Full title)

Original acrylic painting on extra strong drawing paper
with grain Carte d’Art 340g by Sennelier (D340)
Artwork size : 7.87 x 7.87” / 20 x 20 cm

© Online art gallery of painter Eric Bourdon
Lille, France, 2020

     Fanciful academic and curatorial speculations, and arbitrary over-interpretation of works of art, can be examples of intellectual siliness such as those amusingly dissected by Roger Kimball in The Rape of the Masters. Kimball takes as his epigraph the well-known saying of Bishop Butler, from 1726, that “Everything is what it is and not another thing”.

     And yet, the artist’s works, processes and discourses reveal to the curator certain aesthetic and/or theoretical speculations that contain in themselves the seeds of a curatorial experience about, say, identity, theories of representation, or postmodern malaise. As it’s the artist who prefigures and configures the curator’s concept, even when curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist or Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev assert with an impertinent volubility their deliberate intention to go chasing a pink rabbit with blue polka dots in mid-season through the green woods of North East Slovakia…

Axolotl jumping (or swimming) with pleasure.
Also known as the Mexican walking fish,
the axolotl is not a fish, but an amphibian.

     Every artwork, considered from a semiotic point of view, is a “text”, a message that has been constructed in any medium and may be typographic, oral or visual in nature. That brings us to this indisputable conclusion : Nothing which is not alive can be art, and nothing which cannot be art can be true.

   Spéculations curatoriales sur l’art de rien