SUR LA ROUTE DU FEU: ADAM BOGEY

For his first solo show at Pauline Pavec gallery, Franco-Mexican artist Adam Bogey unveils the latest research from his Fuegos [Fires] series, a pictorial approach begun in 2020 and marked by total dedication to a single motif: the sky. Evoking high-altitude atmospheric landscapes, the five canvases presented in the exhibition are invaded by flaming clouds. Painted in oil pastel with pure colours that accentuate the effects of contrast, the dark nebulae streaked with red and deep blue stand out against the brightness of the gaps in the light. Dishevelled, laden with rain and thunder, they threaten at any moment to turn into a storm and unleash their regenerative violence. Adam Bogey stages a cosmic dramaturgy in which we discover, between dread and exaltation, the vision of a fiery and primitive nature which, in a momentary climax, augurs an uncertain future and plunges us into an abysmal meditation on the forces that govern the world.

This vertiginous feeling, accentuated by the exuberance of the colours and the depth of the pictorial field, is redoubled by the absence of perspective and horizon, which removes any sense of scale or reference point, forcing the viewer to navigate in a stellar ocean of loss. The narrow, generic formats, sometimes hung horizontally and sometimes vertically, channel the speed and unfolding of the viewer's gaze, forcing him or her to zigzag through the painting from right to left or top to bottom. Rather than draging us into the immense celestial continuum, out of pictorial space, like the all-over landscapes of an artist like Jon Schueler, Adam Bogey's long canvases have been conceived as loopholes, confining the gaze within the frame and maltreating the visitor in a stifling and sublime eight clos.

Against a backdrop of metaphorical and prophetic conjecture, Adam Bogey uses the sky as a pretext for a profound reflection on painting. By devoting himself compulsively and serially to this same subject for over three years, and working from an impersonal iconography drawn from a thesaurus of images most often found on the Internet, the artist evacuates any auctorial or idiosyncratic system. Using only pastel applied to free canvases directly by hand, without the aid of tools, he establishes a return to the foundations of art and sets the conditions for the possibility of a painting which, like its motif (the cloud is ordinary and can be observed by everyone), presents a universality of appreciation that is commonly shared. Beyond the kitsch romanticism that they may evoke, the works in the exhibition invite us to reflect on the very essence of art and its capacity, even today, to create a shared space capable of reinventing the world.

— Roxane Ilias, art historian