Julien Bouillon

Julien Bouillon has a knack of reconciling opposites: at once a "semionaut", to borrow a word coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in Postproduction, surfing in a sea of signs and symbols, reconfiguring their structure by means of almost OuLiPo-like or neo-conceptualist combinations (like when he extracts sentences from Jacques Lacan's Lettre à Louis Althusser (1963) and transfers them onto the gallery walls in adhesive letters in a group show, interacting with the works present), he can casually become a craftsman and make use of forms of time-honoured know-how, such as painting, ceramics, and sculpture on bones. By painting on canvas, in a hyperrealist manner, the postcard of an abstract painting, or a collection of old coins, or by questioning the grid system which governs Web design, Julien Bouillon comes across like an artist-cum-anthropologist who takes into consideration all the periods and all the aspects of our constructed space. (Yann Ricordel, 2011). Translated by Simon Pleasance