O.C.D

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923, Zéprégüé, Ivory Coast)

Once you find yourself in front of Bouabre's drawings, you get the feeling of having a whole life full of anecdotes spread in fron of your eyes.
He started this collection due to a vision, where he was designated as Cheik Nadro "The who who does not forget". At that pint he began to find his own religion (The order of the prosecuted), he was also keen on recovering an old dialect from the Ivory Coast called Beté.
His divine drawings deal with revelations and the tangible world, this cards are also very useful to get a grasp of the folklore and traditions held in this West African country.

He gathers an amazing collection of hand made index cards, all of them include image and writing, using very simple materials. He started this series in 1982 dividing it into sort of chapters as: "Knowledge of the world" or "myths and symbolism"and "the universe" in which he worked until 88.
This index cards also had an educational purpose, Bouabré was able to teach a lot of members from the order, and also in some  Senegal institutes how to talk and write in this old decaying language and bring it back to life.

Yürksel Arslan (1933, Istambul, Turkey)

Arslan drawings are so charged with historical, literary, philosophical, musical, sociological, artistic and even medical references that resemble some kind of world encyclopedia, which fits the Arsenale space perfectly.

But seriously, this artist who was born in Turkey and lived in Paris ever since 1962. He has worked for over 60 years in creating this obsessive congregation of didactic, direct and sometimes freaky drawings.

The technical matter is also very conceptual and coherent with the subjects he chooses. This drawings are made and coloured using potash, honey, egg whites, oil, bone marrow, blood and urine, which give his drawings this organic looking palette.

His work is definitely overstimulating and covers a great extent of his own history as well as the history of man in general. It is definitely universal even if he uses his own childhood memories sometimes, but we can all relate to it to a certain extent. It also covers a great deal of turkish history, even though geographical boundaries where never an issue for Arslan, he seems like the kind of man who would eat the world in one bite, who wants to know everything about everything and would look for it in the darkest corner of the earth, and we're just lucky to be able to take a look at the deeps inside his brain. 

Jakun Julian Ziölkowski (1980, Zamosc, Poland)

Ziölkowski's paintings where one of the best discoveries at the biennale personally.

His chaotic, mounstruous, bloody, transgressive, ugly, satiric, lunatic paintings blew my mind really, it is hard not to think of The Bosch or Ensor on acid when looking at them.

The amount of detail and the way it all comes together in a compendium of a very bizarre imaginary that just spout out of his brains.

For the 55th Venice Biennale, Ziölkowski worked on a series of paintings inspired by Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Imaginary Beings. There he gathered material and ideas to create his own beasts and mutants to fill up his paintings, which can take quite a while to look at.

Know a bit more of his work:

http://vimeo.com/25094104

http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/art-and-design/2010/07/jakub_julian_ziolkowski/

Robert Crumb's Genesis at Arsenale (55th Venice Biennale)

It is not usual to find comic artists inside high art circuits such as biennales or art fairs, But this year, Massimiliano Gioni's curatorial job, brought a few surprises to the table. One of hem was the entire book of Genesis By the American Artist Robert Crumb, yes! and I mean ALL the originals.

That was definitely one of the highlights of the Arsenale.

This ambitious project is a 207 page/50 chapters, hand drawn and hand written book, it also took five years to be completed. Crumb certailnly enjoys getting inspiration from thebible stories and turning them into even a bigger satire and soap opera than it already is. If you know R. Crumb's work you probably know that he loves to deal with sex, violence a bit of dark humor, human tragedy, laughter and sometimes some crazy LSD fueled characters (this is not the case).

Just standing there watching how this 207 pages spread across the white room is overwhelming. You can feel the obsession for detail on every page, it keeps getting better. Once i left that room I just felt like going out and devouring each one of Crumb's comic books.

Here's a link to a reaaally good documentary if you want to know more about Crumb's work and life:

17th and 18th Century Dutch Doll Houses at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

During the 17th and 18th Century in the Netherlands, specially in Amsterdam some of the greatest and most luxurious doll houses were created, although they were not meant to be toys for children but as show off display pieces in the houses of wealthy ladies.

This houses present the context of a rich dutch household and it emphasizes on the activity of women, in their daily life and it provides a great deal of information about furniture design, or clothing at the time. characters stand there as if they were stills from a stop motion animation, at least that's how I pictured it.

I have always had a special feeling for miniatures, and specially reaaally detailed everyday life furniture and situations, even if it looks very theatrical and luscious, it might even be a replica of an actual household, which is quite extravagant to say the least. 

Jacob  Appel (1680-1751)

Doll's House of Petronella Oortman

Oil on parchment laid down on canvas 1710.

The wealthy families who aquired the houses, also had paintings made of their own doll houses, in this case we get to see both, the actual house and the painting, which of course has some differences and restauration work, also the original characters changed.

A matter of Life, Death and Singing, Jimmie Durham at the M HKA (Antwerp, 2012)

Ok so, I got a bit bored of just going over and over The Venice Biennale, so to give it a rest I thought about giving a second look to some of the exhibitions I've been in since fall, last year. Starting with Jimmie Durham which was one of my favorites. Later I'll continue with the Biennale.

"I am a fool in my love of material of any sort. It must be obviously true to observers of the works. That is neither the beginning nor the end – not the point – of my work and not the method." Jimmie Durham, 2012 

Jimmie Durham's retrospective at the M HKA in Antwerp is the most complete gathering of a lifetime of doing and playing.


Durham is an american born (1940), sculptor, essayist, poet, activist and performer and his work has been remarkably influential in the art world over the pass two decades. During the 60's he was very much involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minessotta, they where fighting for better treatment and opportunities for Indian families in matters of housing, jobs and education.

In 69 he left to Geneve, Switzerland and studied at L'École des Beaux-Arts. Later, he returned to The US and until 1980 he worked as a political representative for AIM and even as a representative of the United nations. when AIM disfragmented, Durham went to New York to pursue his art, he worked on sculptures depicting American Indians, like no one ever did before him.

Afterwards he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico and settled there until 94 when he moved definitely to Europe. Since then he has been working all over the place. Then he focuses on more architectural sculpture, he works with stone, wood, makes sculptures, machines, videos and texts.

  A matter of Life, Death and Singing features his early works, which have never been displayed in another retrospective of his. It featured between 120 and 130 of his works, in which he uses all elements he can to make them part of a visual work. That includes, sound, image, movement, drawing, writing, painting, sculpting, making assemblages, installations... sometimes made along with his wife and artist Maria Theresa Alves.

His work can be considered as a kind of interruption in this world full of belief systems such as religion or money, post-collonialist transformations or the claim for territory, bringing, art, literature and science together in timeless pieces, which will always be rebels of the art. Durham is full of questions, and he inviteds us to think about them as well, he is also not intending to preach anything, he is like a child playing, using every material and media he can, passionately transfering his activist feelings fueled with intellectual and historical awareness into every piece he makes.

(This work, deppicting how the jesus would've probably look like), was at the Venice Biennale, as a part of the show curated by Cindy Sherman.

link: http://blog.frieze.com/55th-venice-biennale-the-arsenale/

Recommended links: http://www.muhka.be/jimmiedurham/en/theexhibition

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/a-matter-of-life-and-death-and-singing-jimmie-durham/