Art: The day after 13 Nov. 2015, Paris 11ème by Boré Ivanoff
An Un-useful Witness
Through the car window I saw them
load a man onto a gurney
after they carried him out of the encampment.
I had not seen the incident,
or observed the precipitating factors.
I was on my way to see my friend,
who was recovering from palliative chemotherapy.
I had not seen her tumors, or the particles,
or the poisons unleashed within her body
in order to prolong her life.
Sometimes I look hard at the surface
of the water, and see breaks
in the cloud cover. My own hands.
I am unable to heal or to verify,
or wave a flag, or testify convincingly –
like the hermit thrush my friend
listens to through her bedroom window.
I am not a girl. But I feel like one
when the ambulance blares past.
Or when the words for inner breakings
are too hard to pronounce.
There are tools to see inside you,
to magnify the evidence and make predictions,
but the muscles of my eyes
are not of use.
In the artist’s words:
Boré Ivanoff. Eastern European- born, contemporary, protean artist, based in Paris since 2001. Since 2012 he paints exclusively Paris. Parisian views, ‘jamais vu’ motives are his special feature, blurring the line between abstraction and realism. For Boré Paris it’s the kind of place that offers the right combination of inspiration and pain and suffering to keep him stimulated and painting. Independent and self-confident, with a remarkable ability to surprise and intrigue the viewer … he prefers the enigmatic, the unconventional, and the unexpected. His work is precise, yet it teeters on the threshold of delirium and chaos. He brings outrageous levels, of pictorial realization to his work. His compositions are a sophisticated exercise in the manipulation of form, keyed-up color, density, illusionism, brushwork, and compression. The interior and the exterior merge to produce a single image whose
complexities are almost impossible to untangle. The result is which the abstract nearly trumps the real. Boré wants to see how far he can push reality to the other side where the “real” is still recognizable, but becoming totally abstract, building that tension until they are just one and the same.
Boré Ivanoff (BG-FR) https://boretzart.wordpress.