museum of new art
Zombie On The Wall
THIRD THURSDAY with the Artist: Thursday, June 18 from 6pm to 9pm
Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, June 12 from 6pm to 10pm
@
Galerie Camille
4130 Cass Ave, Detroit, MI 48201
“An important element of Zombie Formalism is what I like to think of as a simulation of originality”
- Walter Robinson, The Rise of Zombie Formalism, April 2014
“It is an onslaught of copycat and mechanical mediocrity.”
– Jerry Saltz, Zombie on the Wall, June 2014
"Together with his computer, Bourgeau has eaten the brains and guts of the first hundred years of abstraction - only to relieve it all back onto canvas and print in new and playful ways."
- Jessica Hopkins, from the exhibition catalog
SEEING OUT LOUD: A ZOMBIE IN DETROIT
By Jerry Saltz from his ‘Seeing Out Loud’ series
When Detroit artists began to jockey into the mainstream art world at the start of this century it seemed as if the other art centers would quickly eclipse them away again. The opposite has happened. Detroit now looks even more scrappy and sassy by comparison and is infused with a nothing-to-lose drive.
Working in that broken city for two decades, Jef Bourgeau has offered a measured but often biting, yet always exuberant outlook about the art of our times. He reshuffles the deck of art history, undermining orthodoxy, and twisting the clean linear progression of it all, occasionally laying brand new track along the way. And he has been lauded for it, and he has been condemned and censored for it too.
Bourgeau now puts abstraction, new abstraction specifically, at the center of his most recent body of work opening at Galerie Camille but he's not treating this current hot button art world issue as seriously or originally as he does the issue of pure digital painting. And yet with the success of one, Bourgeau trumps the other.
His solo show in Detroit is optically on fire, intellectually edgy, physically lush, and installed like a wrap-around panorama. His digital prints and canvases are vivacious and stylish, his touch and domineering scale alluring. The visual effects are riveting and the sweet smell of printer ink makes you get as close to these as one dog will to another. The overall effect is a mesmerizing tour de force of verisimilitude, love, and intimidation.
At the same time this work is decorator-friendly, especially in a contemporary apartment or house. It feels smart and looks hip. It’s all deployed in inventive arrangements that ape its source, digital media. Edge-to-edge geometric, or biomorphic composition is de rigueur, as are irregular grids, lattice and moiré patterns, ovular shapes, and stripes. For this aspect I especially like the term coined last year by the artist-critic Walter Robinson: Zombie Formalism. These computer paintings are glamorous in part because they are in such good art-historical taste.
Digital palette at hand Bourgeau has non-painted himself from 20th century abstraction into a 21st century corner, but for once it’s just where the artist feels most comfortable and exactly where he wanted to be. It’s in that place where he combines the lucidity and dead-on vision of Piet Mondrian with the deadpan decoration of Andy Warhol.
With over fifty works on display, confronting this much material in one room is daunting. But it's worth it if only to glean the mind of a true maestro in motion.
Bourgeau's show is at Galerie Camille through July 11.
A columnist and art critic for New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. He lives in New York City with his wife Roberta Smith, senior art critic for the New York Times.
If It Looks Like Art Then It Probably Isn't
by Michelle Hedges
Special for the Daily Post
DETROIT – Galerie Camille is being forced to make artistic lemonade after being thrown the ultimate art-world lemon: all of the spanking new paintings created exclusively for the gallery’s Zombie On The Wall Show by Jef Bourgeau, have been outed as fakes.
Years ago that would have been an embarrassment to conceal, but this new Detroit gallery is embracing the fraud.
“One of our goals, other than selling art, is to educate our audience,” said Jessica Hopkins, the exhibition curator. “You can learn a tremendous amount by looking at an object that is not quite right. For the public, it can seem like magic that one is right and one is not. This work demystifies that process.”
The phonies — dozens of paintings on canvas and prints on paper created by Detroit artist Jef Bourgeau— will still go on sale for the gallery’s exhibit on June 12th as if duplicity no longer matters in the world.
“There are a couple works that are too good to be true and a few that are so bad that I can’t believe anyone will take them seriously,” said Edna Pruett, a fiery redhead and local college curator who questioned their origins from the start.
"They aren't true to form, but mere simulations of art," said Edna. "Bourgeau has used computer software to go through all the motions in a few meager minutes that a real artist struggles over for weeks, months or even years."
Hopkins tried to shrug off the growing controversy: "It’s totally absurd. The show hasn't opened yet and your so-called experts haven't even viewed the work in person."
When polled, a nearby gallery owner reacted with the ultimate thumbs down. "It's bathroom art," said Robert Mann, in a twitter exchange with this reporter. "Nowadays the computer can generate anything, even crap."
"They're the ones tapping into artificial intelligence and pulling flimsy critiques out of their you-know-what," Hopkins reacted bluntly. "How can an artist fake his own art anyway?"
"That's obvious enough," Edna countered, "because he's a fake artist. His technique is not his own, but the instant by-product of a computer program - in conspiracy with an ink-jet printer and some canvas remnants."
Other noted experts have since confirmed that Bourgeau's "paintings" may indeed be counterfeit.
"They don't have the tactile depth and signature strokes one would find in a real painting," agreed Carlos Reed, director of the city museum. "All these properties are indeed imitated onto the canvas, but, when viewed in person, they will surely reveal themselves as flat, lifeless and ultimately unreal."
If given the opportunity, what would Ms. Pruett say to the artist?
"Mr. Bourgeau, your pixels are showing," Edna quipped. "Pixelated brushstrokes do not equal true impasto nor true art."
In a century where much of new art is up for grabs, Jessica Hopkins continues to insist that they do.
Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, June 12 from 6pm to 10pm
Exhibition: June 12 to July 11
Hours: 12pm to 5pm Wednesday through Saturday.
@
Galerie Camille
4130 Cass Ave, Detroit, MI 48201
