USA –
Jean-paul Bourdier, Professor of design, drawing, and photography in UC Berkeley’s architecture department, presents his book ‘Leap Into The Blue’.
“Suicide
Is to go to war
Over this earth
That we are
To paint
Is to release
The fragrance
Of one’s passage
On earth
Mysteriousness, like a color
Is human
Unless someone
Has found out
What blue red and yellow
Are
When one is
All boundaries vanish
And I am nowhere to be found
A photograph
May bring silence
The rest
Is superfluous
When is a painting or a photograph
A mirror
Into which
I disappear?
When
Reason derails
All
Appear
Alive
Feeling the body
Feeling the earth
I am not thinking
Therefore I am
Body is light
Light is color
No origin no aim
Just travelling
Just being
when things do not fit
the boxes of my mind…
laughter explodes
and life comes in
I walk this earth
Thinking
That the landscape
Is outside of this body
As if my parents
Were not inside me…
Whatever I say
Whatever I do
This infinite landscape
Is doing it
A painted body lays open
The flowering of something
Unnameable
Jump into the unfamiliar
Until you can hardly breathe
For it will suffocate
You with beauty
Photographing
The incongruous
I give back
To the earth
What it gives
Perpetually
Naked
Walking
Without
The clothes of beliefs
One enters
The desert
Of the self
I paint photographs
I photograph sounds
Sounds are colors
And colors are forms…
The photograph paints me
Working with silence
Why would I need narratives?
Painted bodies
How can I look
At anyone
In terms
Of skin
Color ?
Painted body
Or innermost
Flowering ?
Color is my “black and white”
With colors
The body becomes alien
Any mound or hollow
Becomes a plastic sculpture
Hard to name
Or desire
Photography
Can simply be
Watching
The watcher
Mind is a circus clown
Who believes
He is a banker
A photograph
Is a trace of light
Fast food
For the poor
To paint
Is to be
The mystery
Of light
As matter
To rediscover
The musicality
Of the body
I use paint
Old questions
Bring us to see
That rocks , bodies,
And trees
Are made from the same fabric
Being the landscape
Is to catch our minds
By surprise
What if there were
No selves that taints
The universe
With the color
Of its own glasses?
To be the landscape
Is to rediscover
The mountains and rivers
Within oneself
Losing
Oneself
Into color
One enters
No time
What else
But humor
Can undermine
The constant chatter
Of my mind?
If I look attentively
At the clouds
I should learn everything
About myself
To paint this body
Is to be these clouds
That paint the earth”
