Bruno Botella

Bruno Botella was born in 1976. He lives and works in Paris. He is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. He is represented by Galerie Samy Abraham.

There is something harsh and sophisticated about Bruno Botella’s works. At once constructed and organic, they exude an indefinable presence. Resulting from complex, eccentric processes, his productions are living contradictions, usually taking the form of doughy sculptures. They are the fruit of experiences, or rather experiments carried out on the body of the artist himself, though he is discreetly absent from the work, like a material ghost… One would almost say they come from a story by Edgar Allan Poe  or Jorge Luis Borges, and the same could be said of their strange names: Qotrob, Oborot, Heiran Luc. However, these words well and truly exist, just as the artist’s works do.

This interview with Bruno Botella will be a chance to penetrate a body of work that explores the physical limits of perception. To do this, we will have to plunge into “this horrible inside-outside, which is true space”*, and which haunts all of us.

*Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology 1927-1984, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997 [1952], p. 189.