As a renowned artist born in 1965, Alain Bornain has worked and resided in Charleroi, Belgium, throughout his career. His practice spans multidisciplinary painting, exploring visual forms and languages with a primary focus on the existential dynamics of temporality and memory—themes of disappearance and presence. His art embodies a profound commitment where memories are grafted onto the canvas: traces of the past, fragmented photography, texts, and quotidian imagery form his cherished motifs. The innovative edge of his work lies in the deliberate use of erasure, overlay, deletion, and serialization—techniques designed to achieve an aesthetic of concealment, even vanishing. This approach reflects a nuanced exploration of how memory and time persist through intentional obscurity.
「Artist Introduction」
Alain Bornain's Blackboard series is regarded as one of the most original and radical painting expressions in Belgium over the past 15 years. It constructs a unique artistic language system through its perfect realistic imitation of the depicted objects, profound reflection on the essence of painting and representation, precise dialogue with the core paradigms of 20th-century conceptual art, ability to reshape the classical "vanitas" aesthetic, and its capacity to awaken the emotional burdens carried by blackboards in everyone's inner being. This series not only reproduces objects with near-photographic realism but also fuses conceptual depth with emotional resonance through meta-critical thinking about artistic representation itself.
「Behind-the-Scenes: Exhibition Setup」
