Io Burgard by Jean-Michel Alberola

I.b

Io B. makes machines to capture what cannot be captured. She excels at this impossible task, since she's known since childhood that to even write the word »impossible» is to catch it and turn it into a machine you can carry around with your arms, hands and even eyes. So we can say here, and by implication: being delicate and fragile herself, so are her shaggy machines!

JMa 1902201717h45 PARIS

Interview with Gaël Charbau, February 2017

G.C.: You have entitled this new exhibition «The Balance of Odd», which suggests a rhythm, a coming and going, a dialogue between forms... is this a key to understanding your exhibition?

I.B.: The exhibition is built on the principle of duality: fantasy as a driving force, constraint as a time of contemplation or paralysis. More specifically, it is the limit of this duality that is explored. A boundary that could become a space. The allegorical images of the bridge and the door as passage from one state to another, from one status to another, inhabit the exhibition. The idea of giving a sculptural dimension to the drawing, using resin or plaster frames, and playing on the principle of bas-relief, formally illustrate the principle of a third form, neither drawing nor sculpture, but both. My latest research into translucent resin drawings plays on the principle of passage, in this case of the plane. I'd like to explore this question, as well as that of degree and agglomeration, for this exhibition. I'd like to work on the formula 1+1=3, and develop an installation principle that functions as a whole and at the same time tells its own story in autonomous pieces.

G.C.: There's something in your proposals that makes me think of a kind of impossible encyclopedia, in which you would mix all kinds of knowledge, in the form of fragments of observations and speculations...

I.B.: Absolutely, it's research! If I could, I'd write more. It would be much easier to clarify my thoughts, which are of the presentiment variety. But at the moment, for me, intuition is better asserted formally.

G.C.: Do you write before creating your works?

I.B.: I always use writing, which feeds my images, which function a bit like ideas. When you can't describe something, you «make a drawing», an image. Before finding forms, whether for sculptures or drawings, I make notes and collect documents. The word then becomes a support for form, gradually leaving the space of the images I produce. I've been interested in the status of the pieces I produce: an image can become an object, sliding into another dimension. The principle of dimensions is a bit like degrees of understanding, of points of view, for me it's like taking a step to the side.

G.C.: In many works, we find the presentation of an action that seems to be taking place, often with the help of a rudimentary mechanism. They sometimes remind me of pieces of notices from which bits of explanation have been lost...

I.B.: Mechanism evokes movement, and indeed implies the idea of a passage, from one state to another, from point A to point B. These are not grandiose upheavals, but small shifts that are enough to give direction. In any case, at the moment there's not much room for manoeuvre... As for explanations, I don't want to be authoritarian; I propose shapes that seem to me to have hooks, and it's up to the viewer to reinvest them.

G.C.: But your «mechanics» are often expressed in indolent forms...

I.B.: The soft or shapeless forms are actually quite defined, if only visually. They sometimes float like indeterminate ideas. I try to give a formal account of the thoughts that flow through me. These are often flows of ideas, hence the tubular shapes. I then have to reconstruct them and give them a narrative form.

G.C.: The idea of an absurd form also seems to interest you?

I.B.: I like to play on this idea of conditional or potential. The conditional could very well be the time of this exhibition. As much a wish as a hypothesis, it also proposes an action subject to condition. The injunction «if» constrains the movement, but the possibility it underlies in the formula of the wish revives the dynamic. It is the passage from one intention to another in the same mode that provides the alternative. If all roads lead to Rome, let's clear the way to yet another destination.

Io Burgard was born in 1987 in Talence, France. She lives and works in Paris.

A few dates

Fall 2017: Group Show, Curator: Gaël Charbau, Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, Palais de Tokyo, Paris / Group Show, Le Nouveau Monde Industriel, Curator: Nicolas Bourriaud, Galerie Continua - 2016: Résidence Manufacture de cuir de Seloncourt , Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, under the patronage of Jean-Michel Alberola - 2015: La Ligne Rouge, Galerie Maïa Muller, Paris / Le cri du poisson, presented by Daniel and Florence Guerlain, Premier Regard, Paris / Ravages, Point Éphémère, Paris / Chers objets, Réfectoire des Cordeliers, Paris - 2014 : Ioland , ENSBA, Paris, France / Confort Moderne, Clovis XV, Brussels, Belgium / Birthday Party, La Gad, Marseille - 2013 : Les Méprises, L'été Indien, Collège François Fillon, Paris / Waterproof Urgent Paradise, Lausanne, Switzerland / ICI et ailleurs, Beaux-Arts de Paris, France / Die schönen Tage *Les beaux jours, Atelier Rouart, Paris, France.

Training - 2014: Diploma (DNSEP) at Beaux-Arts de Paris - 2012: Diploma (DNSEP) in illustration at Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg / Diploma (DNAP) at Beaux-Arts de Paris - 2010: Diploma in communication and illustration (DNAP) at Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg.