Paradoxon

FP Boué was born in Marburg, Germany. His work first reached the public sphere in London in the mid 1970s, which led to his first solo gallery exhibition in Milan in 1981. He moved to New York in 1993. His work has been exhibited intermittently in prominent galleries, museums, and other institutional and academic contexts and is held in private collections in Europe and North America. Past institutional solo exhibitions include Participant Inc., New York 2011 and Experimenthaus Neubühl, Zurich 2019. Paradox, in the form that it has taken since Zeno (who said the flying arrow rests), and also since Heraclitus (who said that one could not step in the same river twice), and in light of other Pre-Socratic cultivators of that most enigmatic of all phenomena, the world, is central to FP Boué’s first exhibition at Alex Berns. His is a practice, as well as an ethic, in which intermedium exchange is arrested in media res, leading to intriguing, and paradoxical results. The chief consequence of this process is that things that are still, leaning against walls, on the floor and in front of us, all regain, in diverse ways, a precarious balance that is specific to them. This capturing of the essence of movement and stasis in space and in objects, this feel for the specific gravity of things, makes Boué’s constructed universe go a long way in the direction of paradoxes both pre-and post-Socratic, both old and new. His is a universe made up of reduced geometries of architectural models, sketches of engineering, sculptures made of a single piece of plywood, a universe all black and white, with occasional spolia and natural objects such as pieces of gray and white veined Alpine marble. Boué is an engineer of miniatures and of threshold conditions, of built meditations on the neglected border areas between object-worlds and mediums. All of which he offers as episodes of a larger philosophical itinerary within his own artistic trajectory. —Daniel Sherer, Excerpt from an essay for the forthcoming publication, Doxa/Paradoxa: FP Boué, or The Enigma of Objects Daniel Sherer is currently Visiting Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University School of Architecture and soon-to-be Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano.

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