Abel Burger

 

Following the exhibition opening, we sat down with Burger to talk about the show, and its relationships to ancient civilisations, mythology and the traditions of storytelling.

 

I would say I always work very spontaneously and I don't intellectualize my work. I think each piece I've done tells a story and if you reunite all of them, you can feel a bigger narrative with different layers that deal with the main topics I care about: mythology, intimacy, dreams, memories and utopia. I think I better talk about intention. This is for me an important part regarding this exhibition: it allows me to create no distinction between the artist and the person I am, as I feel able to talk not only about how I perceive the world but also about how I want to interact with it.

For me, this word represents several symbols. It was the first horse I rode as a kid. It is also a crossbreed horse with a long and complex history. Prehistoric cave paintings depict leopard-spotted horses and we have traces of them through Ancient Greece, Ancient Persia and later in France during the Middle Ages. Appaloosas are for me a way of creating a time scale and navigating freely within it.

Many of your works seem to open up parallel worlds, their characters existing in an otherworldly or dream-like state. How would you describe your own state when creating these works? 

By the act of drawing, it feels like I can access another kind of reality. I feel like an interpreter, a channel, whether of a parallel world or a dream. The field of possibilities is very large once you allow yourself to explore it without fear or judgment.

 

The exhibition also emerges from your interest in and exploration of ancient civilizations and myths. What inspirations do you draw from these sources? Well, I can tell that I have quite a complex relationship to personal and family history. It's probably because as I don't know much about that, since a young age, I could dive into the exploration of whatever history could tell about people or about myself. Ancient civilizations say so much about us today whether it is about what we have done or what we could have done but also what we should do today. I could say I don't really feel I belong to this society, so that is my way of staying in the present. In fact, I could find so many reasons to explain why I draw what I draw but maybe the first reason is because it feels like home.

The works in the exhibitions, and the intricate details contained within them, emerge from a deeply personal, constructed system of logic, for instance, your hieroglyph system. What are the foundations and motivations for this logic?
I started to identify the first foundations of this new way of working when I started to create the Temples. I was into architecture for a long time, especially interested in the realizations of Tadao Ando, a Japanese autodidact architect. I was reading a book of interviews about his thoughts on architecture and landscape and how it was important to create elements that could reconcile humans and nature. I think everything I'm doing is modern tools, inspired by the past to create a language that allows people to be closer to their emotions. So maybe I could say it's about reconciling humans and their nature.