Boris Thiébaut - 'Every Minute Is Lettered'

In a singular relationship to drawing, movement and written language, Every Minute Is Lettered is built around a recent series of large-format drawings on paper. Part Outsider Art, part graphic design, and part comic strip, this visual poetry uses gesture, writing, speed, signs, and materials.

I’m trying to find the right balance between simplicity and complexity: simple tools and direct technique. The complexity of a composition of layers, repetitions, and deletions. It is also about the complexity of reading, where movement and sign battle for the same ground. These shapes are constantly fighting to build their own hesitant language that simultaneously seeks and denies itself as it develops.

The exhibition also features a series of automatic drawings teetering between ready-made graphic poetry and working drawings, monumental murals based on these same drawings, and a previously unseen series of paintings on wood.

The title Every Minute Is Lettered comes from a newspaper clipping. It is a poetic figure of speech with open-ended meaning, conjuring up a loose relationship with time, the written word, drawing, and archives.

Every Minute Is Lettered is also the title of an artist’s book made in collaboration with graphic designer Caroline Wolewinski and published by Le Botanique. Both the exhibition and the book were designed as autonomous albeit complementary objects. They will engage in a dialogue at the Musée du Botanique from 1 September to 29 October 2023. This book represents a journey into the peripheral material of the oeuvre. Fragments of reality, studio meanderings, automatic drawings, notes, doodles, etc. This vast body of material unfurls inside the space of the book. It records a creative process and reveals the breeding ground of references and influences. The document meets the object. Artworks (a recent series of drawings on paper and their titles) intersperse the documents, providing some keys to understanding. Graphic poems and strange riddles emerge, carried by a distinctive use of both written and visual language.

Boris Thiébaut’s work has been exhibited at the Baronian, Anyspace, Desimpel, and Locuslux galleries in Brussels, as well as at Nicolas Silin in Paris. He was also featured at the BPS22 in Charleroi, the Salon du Dessin in Paris, the Liste Art Fair in Basel, and Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery of Art. He was a resident at the WIELS contemporary art centre, and at the Maison d’Art des Chartreux, Brussels.

In parallel with the exhibition and the book, the artist and David Jarrin are organising a series of music events, Live at Museum, in collaboration with the Botanique’s music department. The programme will explore some of the recurring themes in Boris Thiébaut's research: Abstraction, repetition, distortion, mental landscapes, and the micro/macro relationship.