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Matthew
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Apartments
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articles
Radioactive
spring: Sarah de Teliga revisits nature. Tania
Mouraud: Martin Luther King speeches, nails and brass rings, violins, accordions,
and computer generated sounds: an ode to music. Emily
Harvey: a life in
fluxus. Swept
off my feet: Keith Donovan in poetic frame on Jerome
Borel's Paris inspired paintings. America
it seems, is holding vast quantities of Codeine,
Tiger Balm, Tylenol, Preparation H, Chanel No. 5, and Vaseline. Fear
and painting in America: flagging multiculturalism. Jeremy
Stigter's Japanese landscapes: an empire of emptiness. Strange
money: Peggy Preheim
makes a buck. The
lonely contents of a strange world are undeniably ours: Caterina
Verde in Eindhoven. "This
coming together between video, photography and paint involves the environment
and myself. The video footage acts like a paintbrush" says Valentina
Loi. [Warhol
Factory hand] Billy Name once said of Ray Johnson
that he "wasn't a person, he was a collage, a sculpture." Exacting
images of people in the celebrated and banal act
of wearing clothes. Could this be you? James Startt focuses on Uniforms. On
a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese
in Rome, romantic
minimalist Livia
Signorini unfurls
a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers. Painting is either back, or, never left the building.
A discussion around the state of art today. Did
Picabia prefigure our current
human-technology
questions? MADE
IN JAPAN: KILLER CUTENESS INVADES PARIS "What
I do is not really art, not really furniture," chairs
from the throne to the unsitable. Michael
Mandiberg is selling everything. Everything is art, everything is for
sale "...Images
of the Towers being struck and then falling in a plume of smoke." One illusion
of Heaven against other illusions of Heaven.
Fought to the death?" A
letter from Paris, from Basel. Art 32 Basel
reviewed. Swiss
artist thomas hirschorn, in association with
the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Jean-Noel Laszlo: liberty
is still controversial.
Jonathan Horowitz's interactive low- technology web
enabled art show reviewed.
part
1 Art, Paris, porn and the web. part
2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film. part
3
asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction? |
letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
  
jerome
borel in his studio
jerome
borel : : by keith donovan I
sleep one floor below Jerome Borel's studio. Two years ago, he would come in early
and make a whooshing noise. In my half-sleep I believed at first the sound to
be those plastic brooms you hear in Parisian gutter rivulets. Evenly paced sweeping,
steady, for hours and hours. Every
couple of days we'd have coffee upstairs and I could see all that sweeping condensed
into the paintings. It made the images hum. They resemble blurry landscape photographs
taken from trains, complete with the whiplash power lines you see on the TGV at
top speed. Some of the paintings looked like northern Burgundy just out of Paris.
I saw gray/blue and green fields and skies with industrial elements flickering
in and out from painting to painting, measuring the space between telephone poles.
Jerome
Borel En ce Jardin (a) acrylic on canvas
The gray, black
and white urban industrial material filled the frame of the later paintings of
this period. They all contain RER underground/elevated strobing and an oil, metal
and rust scrawl that reminded me of the Canal de l'Ourcq.
***
I left Paris for almost a year and on my return in place of the sweeping
noise there was a stage-whispering static, a throbbing white noise punctuated
by blasts of Sonic Youth. The painter was audibly sandpapering his pictures. Some
of them looked like half- renovated walls or half-destroyed frescoes. Softened
lines unfurled into a marine life form or silhouetted an advanced sexual fantasy.
There were nipple-shaped jellyfish. I saw the torrid palette of Gustave Moreau,
the greens and reds. Even the cerulean blue was hot: Odilon Redon at Gare de L'Est,
where calcified water has seeped through the dark orange wall tiles for the last
10 years, leaving great white coral-form stains. Pubic-black shapes nestled in
stellar globules.
Speed, symbolism, decay, sex. Together that makes what?
Middle age intellectuals romp in the w.c. on the TGV? This is an elegiac carnal
symbolism: painting as sex; florid and skanky. The painter's high-speed flickering
is still visible but it's been reduced to something seen between the floorboards,
one element among others. These couplings or copulations begin to humanize and
populate the earlier landscapes.
***
Jerome
Borel En ce Jardin (b) acrylic on canvas
Then
all sound stopped coming down the stairs. In the very last works I saw focus on
the erotic had been diffused into a wider range of events. The painter's imaginative
gaze elevates phenomena more banal than sex into highly important activity. Paint
dribbled dramatically sideways as fellow passengers, their bodies juicy puzzles
fitted into foam core seats, ate, drank, read and slept their way to more of the
same. Perhaps
M. Borel is performing the simple act, on a train, of looking away from the window,
or from his fantasies, to observe with sideways glances his fellow travelers.
He seems to be travelling very fast towards something ever more familiar. He has
caught this movement and the grave dignity it contains with the abandoned precision
of a train conductor punching a ticket. We carry on with our business, more excited
and more intent on paying attention. It's all going by so quickly. Jerôme
Borel's exhibition of paintings, "En ce Jardin" opened in Tours, France
in September 2004 at La Chapelle des Lazaristes. Jerome Bôrel can be contacted
at: borel.jerome@free.fr Keith
Donvan is a Canadian artist living in Paris. He will show textile prints and his
Breughel series paintings at Michel Foex Gallery in Geneva in January 2005. His
e-mail: keith_donovan_fr@yahoo.ca 
Keith
Donovan Detail of Prudence, 2004 painting on tea towel
affiliates
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