Boris Achour — À propos — Slash Paris

“At first glance we are struck by the radical formal and conceptual heterogeneity of Boris Achour’s work. Videos, sculptures, drawings, paintings, performances, installations, acoustic pieces… the artist draws on more or less the whole gamut of contemporary art’s know-how, and each one of his projects seems to encompass a specific theme by ushering in its own technical logic, adapted to the subject. Contextualized skills, never capitalized and challenged by each new piece trajectory (…) Going against the grain of any stylistic logic, Achour seeks out ways out of the systems, which he sets up. But not so much dodging as a strategy of on-going movement, and dynamic investigation from one work to the next. A nightmare for art criticism with its simplistic tendencies, afraid of nothing quite so much as stylistic and notional indeterminacy.”

— GuillaumeDésanges, in “Unity” 2005

Despite the disjointed nature of Achour’s work, in his latest series Conatus, Achour chooses to work with mobiles precisely because of their ability to reunite a variety of resources and to balance chaos. With a sense of play and the use of eye-catching, colourful and sparkly materials, Achour’s mobiles should not be mistaken for childlike. There is an intellectual maturity to his work. This solar system of pieces references a constellation of artistic stars- Calder, Lewitt, Judd. Moreover the series is based on the Spinozian idea of ‘conatus’, a philosophical concept purporting joy as a otivational force and meaning the endeavour to persist in one’s own being. This becomes Achour’s mission statement: he seeks to demonstrate how the systems behind “common culture” exist by strategically upending them from their intended purpose.