AGNES BOURELY
The Restless Forgetfulness of What We Exile
March 22 – April 27, 2019
Artist Reception:
Friday, March 22, 6:00 - 8:30 PM
Drift at Random (Series 1-6) 2019, pencil and gouache on paper, 81 x 82 inches framed
For immediate release:
Barbara Davis Gallery is pleased to announce The Restless Forgetfulness of What We Exile, an exhibition of new drawings and paintings by internationally known French artist Agnes Bourely. The Restless Forgetfulness of What We Exile, opens Friday, March 22, 2019 with an artist reception from 6 - 8:30pm.
Agnès Bourély has entered the sphere of visual practice through a life enriched by a family of musicians. Encroaching from her mother and sister, as pianists and her father, a photographer, her eldest daughter is a violinist and sound engineer – she was occupied by the sounds of French impressionist music in neoclassical concert halls both by the generation that preceded and succeeded her. An acrobat of sorts, growing up in a neoimpressionist environment as a guitarist herself, has transformed Bourély’s abilities to diversify her stylistic analyses of familiar forms of nature into a deputy of visual sounds. Boldness starts to appear in the bulk-ability of the work and the contortionist acting out the story becomes the pathologist of solfège.
With the knowledge of sound, a musician has the ability to audiate and mentally listen to the selective scripts prescribed in front of them. Bourély’s journey is infused with every line and every brushstroke, provoking and enforcing the vital signs of movement. Not a single movement, but a shift of collective movements rise out of the two-dimensional sphere like that of sound. Her work is a clarity of obeying and selective abeyances, as she uses and suspends from that ‘contortionists’ direction’. What is performed in a concert hall, is indulged by the intimacy of the musician and their instrument, and then through the movement of sound is what provokes the inspector to their next, most current indulgence.
The solo contortions grow through the stroke of an instrument and it’s next movement is built from fragments of symphonies. A rise of sound, eventually has a fall, but depending on Bourély’s rise and fall, might an incarnation appear. Whether in the form of a cycle, or a turning point of engagement as the work rotates from one movement to another, Bourély’s work has created a sense of selective exile.
Bourély has moved to 7 countries in 12 years. Her commitments to her home and family has also been the director of her interchangeable social environments. A constant adjustment, and re-adjustment with dependents and dependees calls for, once again, a diversified rule of engagements. Her role as a mother, wife, and self-embodiment welcomes the malleability of her identity to take on the solfège in a dictation of pitches and selective movements in degrees. High and low, deep and wide, major and minor scales of engagement rule the concept of domesticity and liberté.
Bourély personalizes the grasp of the materials being used for the work of art in the making, only to revisit and for the contortionist to return. The crayons that draw out definitive lines, and the brushstrokes that also derive the negative and positive spaces as they fall in and out of their respective environments, tends to carry a grounding and a sky-like derivation of space. Everything that occurs in between is what we are left with to use as a playground of unlimited possibilities. Both beautifully pure, and beautifully evolved in the movement of an artist who finds herself in Houston, has re-defined and renewed her approach to her work. Bourély’s picturesque honesty remains the most constant and heightened sensibility and this is a unique glimpse to what Houston derived in her.
Bourély received her BA in painting; Diplôme d’Art Plastique, Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Angers, France in 1986. She received a Silver Medal from The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, Colorado 1988. Her solo exhibitions include the French Consulate State Anzoátegui, Venezuela Gallery "Colette Dubois,” 420 Rue Saint Honoré Paris, France in 2015; The Ministry of Finance Bercy in Paris, France Gibert Joseph Library, Boulevard Saint Michel in Paris, France, Gallérie Colette Dubois, 420 Rue Saint Honoré Paris, France in 2014 and Esprit d’Atelie Gallérie in Versailles, France Le Vis-à-Vis Gallérie in Paris, France in 2013.
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