DETROIT: History of Modern Art
art | room
art | room
You are invited to our Grand Opening on
September 24, Saturday from 5 to 10pm
@ the Pontiac location - 7 North Saginaw Street:
'Jessique en Verte: Picasso Cubed'
A HISTORY OF MODERN ART:
New work by Jef Bourgeau
If the art director Jessica Hopkins and the artist Jef Bourgeau were to impart one essential bit of wisdom
to both aspiring gallerists and artists, it would probably be this: stay flexible.
This Saturday, when the two friends open their art | room project first in Pontiac (then October 1st in Detroit),
their idea is to present strong, intelligent work for an audience deliberately limited to emerging collectors, curators, designers and art insiders.
"It's the opposite of your usual commercial gallery. We are spending all our time with people, and less time thinking about the next show or fishing for the next big thing," says Hopkins.
"It will be about speaking with new and established collectors in an environment of relative leisure and calm."
"Jef is a remarkable artist," Hopkins continues.
"He has attempted to crush the traditional parameters of painting -- without picking up a brush."
'Guernica Colorized, 2011'
A HISTORY OF MODERN ART:
Art has become recurrent to a fault, a reflex reaction to its own history.
'Guernica Colorized, 2011'
A HISTORY OF MODERN ART:
Art has become recurrent to a fault, a reflex reaction to its own history.
Rather than finding new modes of creation and enlightenment, art has thrust itself into a protracted state of reorientation.
The best of today's artists subdue the cultural present through the internalization of its recent past.
So that new art is only about old art.
At the cutting edge of this retro-corruption is the work of Jef Bourgeau.
His art is all about reliving the past century, a past that is barely past.
And he does so with a sloppy precision that invites creative distortion and a confused aesthetic
that comes from misremembering and dislocation.
Living in a remix culture, Bourgeau's work is both composed and engineered by cheap digital tools.
His hackneyed revolution of perception and representation is achieved via this instant technology,
and the easy access of digital streaming has allowed him to treat the whole of art history
as a free zone for resource extraction and dissolution.
Promoting his very own poverty of abundance and dyspeptic sense of the new,
Promoting his very own poverty of abundance and dyspeptic sense of the new,
Bourgeau's creative destruction delivers its own shock and awe on the backs of others.
He brutalizes what's come before without any effort to supplant it.
And for him, talking and writing and remaking existing art has become more exciting than actually viewing the originals.
"Art is no longer anything except immobility," Bourgeau explains.
"Art is no longer anything except immobility," Bourgeau explains.
"An artist today must be brave enough to close doors, to let new ideas go unused.
Today's artist must create art without possibility, without a future. And only then, in this darkness, will it resonate eternity."
art | room preview location: 7 North Saginaw St., Pontiac, MI
art | room preview location: 7 North Saginaw St., Pontiac, MI
