Benoit Bourdeau

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04.30–05.31.1998

Finding the gold—the key to the riddle.

Scrutinizing the universe and the indigenous inhabitants.

Assembling a team of experts and organizing an expedition to the fringes of a lost world to discover the microscopic spores of a parasitic fungus growing on a metal with strange properties—a metal hitherto unknown.

Conducting excavations, marking out the perimeter, separating fact from fiction, assigning a name and an epithet to everything—at any cost.

Explaining the phenomenon, putting it into perspective.

Let’s go see if there’s any water left on Mars—I’m thirsty!

Believing in the Grail—a massive, undeniable prize.

Searching elsewhere, once again, for the ultimate object—the Thing—that will reflect our purest image back to us, that will convince us that things cannot be so simple, that there must be more to it all than just *this*.

Polishing the perfect mirror oneself.

There is undoubtedly a touch of that kind of frenzy in my work. In a roundabout way.

By imagining what might be the overlooked remnants of that great stampede, I turn my attention to the blind spots—to the places where there seems to be nothing; where light passing through a diamond prism illuminates the ordinary and offers a view of the world whose very obviousness often turns against itself; where, from the catastrophic to the intimate, everything is always something else—and yet nothing other than exactly that.

Text by Benoit Bourdeau