Self-taught, streetwise and incisive, NYC-based Bourgeois invites viewers to experience entropy, the visual language of signage and to confront with the ever-evolving streets from which he draws inspiration.
When do you think your interest in art really took off?
My earliest influences were magazines like Heavy Metal, formal surrealism, local artists in the gallery scene, and contemporary artists like Robert Longo. I like subversive, personal art; I like to keep things open-ended and ambiguous to make people draw their own conclusions. I believe each piece has a story; it’s not some poster telling you what to do, think, or feel.
You’ve been here in New York for around four years now. How has the city inspired you?
All the graffiti and sticker art, to me, reflects both the discipline and chaos of modernity. The streets have no limits, everywhere you’re faced with art, and it’s a gallery that’s temporary, always changing. Shit’s there one day, one week or whatever, and it’s gone. And the more formal art scene is great, too, always moving in so many directions at once. It reminds me of how music was in the early 90s, when there were more genres than there were labels. Skate, punk, new wave, electronic music and the technology to produce it shattered existing conventions. Everything just started to merge. In the way that music became more accessible to the masses, publicly and privately, so has art. And the streets drove that.
Where is your work going?
My art’s going its own way, where I wanted it to go years ago. It’s been a little different for me because I was never a formal art student. I’m getting more into found objects, like machine components, for instance. These things are understood and tangible, precise and beautiful in the way that drawing is. My work is photorealistic, so I want to create drawings that are eye-catching but are also concrete, solid, like sculpture, and draw the viewer into a deeper meaning.
What kind of experiences from your youth do you draw on today? What still shows?
Skating was part of it, and for me that came out of punk rock. It was a way to get around, it was fun, but you knew you weren’t gonna have it forever, so there was the whole creation/destruction side of it. Skating was unstructured and personal, expressive. We’d go into these old warehouses and literally start nailing shit together, making these janky ramps out of trash. Then we’d light bonfires in the middle of all of it and paint graffiti on the walls. A spot would last a few weeks and it would be gone, so we’d go find another one. We had no money, nothing, so we had to find ways to have fun. After that there was music, and for a while I owned an indie record shop down there. But in the end, art was my thing; it overshadowed everything else.
What themes do you explore?
I guess I’m most into self-image, identity, and entropy, which is the inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society. I try to deconstruct and examine these things as I work through them.
How does a piece come together?
It’s funny. One simple thing can set something off. Some weird little thing or image like a logo or something will set me off. A piece is built spontaneously, it comes together honestly and it’s never forced. I just let it run. I’ve learned to give it time, to be patient. The process itself is a little like me sitting in a room on a pile of images. I choose what excites me most. I want that “pop.” If you were choosing an apple, you’d pick the shiny red one, not the soft brown one. So I select and juxtapose images accordingly. But the way it comes together actually surprises me sometimes.
Your work contains a number of recognizable signs and logos. Why do you incorporate them into your work?
Signs are a language all their own. You could put together a story with just these visual markers. The signs in my work complement the piece as a whole. A yield sign is a warning. A pharmaceutical logo suggests the body. For example, one of the insurance companies uses a rock as its logo, trying to create an image of stability and security when actually, that rock is changing, going through transformative processes just like everything else. It’s no different than the streets, really.
Things have really taken off for you within the last year, with popular gallery shows and selling a number of your pieces. How do you as an artist deal with the art vs. product dilemma?
Getting bigger is tricky. It sits in the back of my head all the time. I would like to grow so more people can see my stuff, but I want it to stay as honest as it is now.
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