Jules Bourbon

Jules Bourbon, born in Paris in 1994, lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the Villa Arson and the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2023, where he studied with Hélène Delprat and Clément Cogitore. His artistic practice lies at the crossroads of contemporary art and cinema. Mixing video, installation and photography.
He makes short videos. Conceived as isolated objects or capsules, they last only a few minutes, or even seconds.
Writing is the backbone of his work. It’s made up of small, supposedly insignificant details that, when brought together, create an echo.
The filmed images are trivial moments, sometimes portraits, and most of the time, places of passage and flux.
In a literary and plastic experimentation with the ordinary, the vulgar and the commonplace, his aim is to plunge us into a sensitive state of “where nothing happens”.

The artist’s work

The practice of writing is the backbone of my work. It has no method, process or ritual. It emerges in bits and pieces, fragmented, and condensed in the notes on my phone before becoming a narrative, a self-fiction. It’s made up of small, supposedly insignificant details, which, when brought together, echo, awaken memories and imaginations, and draw the first threads of narrative wefts to be invested.

I make short videos. Conceived as isolated objects, capsules, they last only a few minutes, or even seconds.

The images filmed are trivial moments, sometimes portraits, and most of the time, places of passage and flux.
I use systems to add material and textural effects to the images, to the point of making them sibylline.
Using magnifying glasses, mirrors, light effects, superimpositions, screens, scans and prints, I fashion a blurred, indecisive and uncertain image, inviting us to drift, guided by the steady, continuous flow of a voice that is always neutral and calibrated in words.

In the hollow of a literary and plastic experimentation with the ordinary, the vulgar and the commonplace, my aim is to plunge us into a sensitive state of « là où il ne se passe rien » / To pierce – amusingly and tenderly – the beauty and violence of the margins we foment.

“The beauty that interests me is that which comes from dirty things, from the street, from rotten, sticky stuff, and doing something bright and shiny, almost fascinatingly true, makes me want to.” Virgile Vernier

Text co-written with Aurélie Faure