WORK FROM: MY GIRLFRIEND IS IN A COMA series...
Let Me Go Where I Want To Go, 2014 - multi-media on paper
Abstract art is an ever-changing Rorschach test. The best of it allows one to see something new and different at each viewing. This continued series of paintings from Jef Bourgeau seems to bring all these open readings to a full-stop. They do so by simply imprinting each painting with its own specific narrative title, culture and author. Yet, in the same stroke, each sends the viewer on a larger quest for meaning and expression rarely found in abstract art: by this forced suggestion of narrative. The title painting [My Girlfriend Is In A Coma] now becomes not simply a spiral of death, but, by its title and animated gesture, an awkward vortex of cubes and colored compartments that compress a girl's life into a rarefied meaning, not simply of her unique life but, in a much larger sense, of art itself. - Jessica Hopkins, Chief Curator @ the Museum of New Art
