FRAGMENTS OF ETERNITY

BORIS TOUCAS 

Solo Exhibition

20th Nov - 21st Dec 2024

Opening Wed 20th Nov 6-9PM

This exhibition will be opened by Barbara Moore

CEO of the Biennale of Sydney

Passages in Ballpoint 

By Melissa Bianca Amore

……………………

“There is no other case in which the memory which recalls is sure to obey the memory which repeats. Everywhere else, we prefer to construct a mechanism which allows us to sketch the image again, at need, because we are well aware that we cannot count upon its reappearance.” 

                      Henri Bergson, 2004[1]

Does memory obey observation or is it a series of recollections from another’s history? At what point can we accept the reality we perceive without contamination? Layered with overlapping histories, Boris Toucas’s personal portraits, acting as miniature memorial sites, reveal a human vulnerability and our unremitting need to preserve or record our most intimate encounters. Rendered in ballpoint: the ubiquitous tool synonymous with the “doodle,” Toucas’s drawings in Fragments of Eternity are recorded moments from exchanges with iconic masterpieces, landscapes, people and psychological spaces. Presented as a successive series, representing both interior and exterior worlds, these fragments of memory give the impression of entering a lucid dream or a continuous stream of consciousness. 

What perhaps began as diaristic musings with a pen; as purposeless play or doodling, through the simple act of drawing, Toucas reminds us that acute observation opens new pathways to recollection. “The emotion that I feel when I draw is flow. It’s a distraction from the present world,” Toucas remarks. “I see it as a meditative process, beyond consciousness, when you deliberately get rid of what’s intellectual.” Known to many as a diplomat, this exhibition marks a return to drawing since his early teenage years. For this French artist, it was the expansive Australian landscape, depicted in the watercolours by Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira, and a return to the heart of ancestral memory, that triggered a nostalgia for drawing; where exchanges become fragments of eternity. 

The mixture of disparate subject-matter in these works, from Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, 1506, alongside the acclaimed Indigenous scholar and activist Marcia Langton, and the French romantic painter Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, 1819 to Ancient Wisdom, 2024 depicting a tree of knowledge from Western Australia, interestingly provides insights into how our personal encounters become entwined with collective memories. The artist’s ability to invite the viewer as an ambivalent observer into his captivating encounters, with either Marcia or the Mona Lisa, obscures the act of recognition and of recollection. “These pictures, with their radiant and melancholic blue, represent unique moments I lived, experienced and felt first-hand,” he says. “While they capture tiny slices of an ordinary life, they are also a secret window into my own intimate world. Most are linked to untold personal stories and feelings, that only few "initiates" can unlock.”  

Known as the “hour blue” or L'heure Bleue, the monochrome blue-light illuminated in these drawings, create a chromatic auratic temporal shift from day into night and from the bodily to incorporeality.  The use of the ballpoint, which is characteristically connected with handwriting and language, also pronounces a type of reflexivity or shift from author to artist. Despite the perception as being a product of mass culture and discredited as an artistic medium, the ballpoint was employed by many acclaimed artists from the 1950s, such as Cy Twombly, Alighiero Boetti, Lucio Fontana and IL Lee, as well as Andy Warhol, as a drawing tool. For artists like Boetti, the ballpoint was explored as a type of decoding device or lens into the layers of the universe; revealing its system of codes, coordinates, structure, signs–and indexicalities of order, chaos and harmony.

For Toucas, the ballpoint, with its immediate and permanent nature, is used as a different type of mapping apparatus and precision tool; attempting to enter the layers of his own personal archive and interactions with the world. “A pen can’t lie: what’s on paper stays on paper. The process of drawing freehand, without a grid or pencil, an eraser or a magnifier, is a deliberating excruciating journey towards redemption.” Mechanical in nature, the ballpoint has two basic functions–turning and grinding, producing detailed cadences: shadow, tonality and spatiality, made from the interplay of points and lines. These basic coordinates, are the connecting structural elements that visualize the world we perceive. 

Within a commonplace beauty lives the monumental in Fragments of Eternity; inviting us to reconsider the art of observation through the mechanics of “doodling;” which begin as recollections or passages in ballpoint. “The ballpoint is a precision tool and it creates a different image to the camera. Anyone can press a button to take a picture, but how do you make sure it’s your memory; reflecting your own emotions and past. Even as people live with my drawings, they will still be my memories, even obfuscated they live through another medium, and I like that.”

Melissa Bianca Amore is an art critic, philosopher and curator based between Melbourne, Paris and New York. 

[1] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (London: Dover Philosophical Classics), 103