Alain Bornain

Alain Bornain (Genappe, 1965) occupies the Dupont room with this extensive monographic exhibition of old and new work, a collection tracing the past 25 years of his artistic journey.

Starting in the mid-1990s and maintaining a decidedly con­tem­po­rary rela­tion­ship with images, Alain Bornain has never confined himself to just one category of the plastic arts, or to one single subject. Using different media (paint on canvas or objects, instal­la­tions and drawings, occa­sion­al­ly on post-it notes or printer paper), the artist explicitly evokes our rela­tion­ship with life, death, our origins, memory, oblit­er­a­tion, dis­ap­pear­ance, trans­fer­ence and heritage. Be that as it may, his work neither avoids an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal dimension nor the concerns inherent in art and their recording in a pictorial reference system, and brings certain historical themes, such as Vanity, up to date.

Alain Bornain’s works, whether the Blackboards, Greyboards or Whiteboards series (canvases painted to look like school blackboards) or the portraits based on photos created by the artist (a new departure), involve a clever play on the confusion between an image and its medium. From the outset, the same process is evident: an exploration of all the poten­tial­i­ties offered by the complex rela­tion­ships connecting painting and writing. While some canvases emphasise the oblit­er­a­tion of the subject they represent, others observe words and figures inter­twin­ing, suggesting wider concerns that go beyond a rigid artistic framework. Undoubtedly this is where all the ambivalence of Alain Bornain’s works lies; works that can also be understood as an exact imitatio of an object or subject, carriers of specific meanings, like a pictorial exercise that documents every artistic possibility offered by painting.