Anne Bourse, Different times, different Paul, 2021, exhibition view, Crèvecœur, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Crèvecœur presents a selection of works by Anne Bourse with a text by Pascaline Morincôme.

— I pay a visit to Anne and she almost immediately shows me a big book by Matt Mullican, That Person’s Workbook. Mullican has made hundreds of performances, paintings and drawings under hypnosis, all attributed to an alter ego he calls That Person. Matt Mullican says that this person is sensual, impulsive and a bon vivant; nothing makes him happier than a good cup of coffee. Because That Person doesn’t need to think much before entering into action. He also has a few entrepreneurial urges: he likes walking, building, doing sums and constructing all kinds of things. Anne and I reckon what we all have a That Person, who does stuff that we don’t always manage to do, while also having tendencies which we try our best to stifle: an authority that we sometimes try to repress, or else a fatigue that makes us want to break off our work.

Stupid sun who can’t stop moving, 2021, exhibition view, La Tôlerie, Clermont-Ferrand. Photo: Ludovic Combe.

Anne tells me that if she listened to her That Person, she’d probably spend most of her time in bed. There’d be no more exhibitions, she’d draw and swim all day in an ocean of fabrics and paper without needing to know where she was going.

Gens qui s’éloignent, exhibition view, Galerie Édouard Manet, Gennevilliers, 2022. Photo: Margot Montigny.

— I start imagining Anne’s That Person in a huge, extremely comfortable bed. She’d be wearing gilded clip-on earrings and really beautiful silk pyjamas with sleeves with embroidered hems. Snug among the folds of her blankets, she’d be drawing endless motifs right onto the underside of her duvet. All around, there would be large lamps giving off a warm and comforting light, down by the floor.

If you lifted up the studio-bed’s huge duvet, you’d find many things she needs for her work: lots of pencils, Tipp-ex, printed velvet, a sewing kit, books, photographs of really pretty boys and even a big dog sleeping up against her. She’d stay there under her sheets, but she’d still be extremely busy: she’d answer loads of phone calls during the daytime and, in the evening, she’d welcome lots of friends, who’d slip under the duvet with her to drink instant decaf and watch episodes of Columbo while she was drawing.

Anne Bourse, Different times, different Paul, 2021, exhibition view, Crèvecœur, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

— At her place, Anne tells me about an episode of the series with Peter Falk called Strange Bedfellows, in which the lieutenant investigates the murder of a young gambler on horse races. To solve the mystery and make the killer confess, he has to team up with a dark counterpart, a Mafia godfather, successful businessman and owner of several businesses in Los Angeles. There’s even an entire scene shot through the stained-glass windows in the shopfront of Bruno’s Restaurant, which Anne shows me in photos. I can clearly see that those Bedfellows are directly related to That Persons. Peter Falk didn’t solve the investigation in bed, but his ally was rather like his underworld other self.

Futur, ancien, fugitif, 2019, exhibition view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

— What I find so beautiful in Anne’s work is how she toys with this compromise between her That Person and herself, that toing and froing between drawing in bed — because you can do anything on paper, with no complications — and objects that still remain utterly crumpled. Anne describes such mattresses, anoraks, or mock-ups as ways to model thoughts and desires.

They are objects whose lines look simply sketched out, just enough for them to be shown, as objects emerged from a bed. They are not finely finished sculptures, but crafted fantasies. Because, as Anne tells me, rather than “putting on an exhibition”, she embroiders little things, she draws, then runs away. She says that her show could well have been called just that, I Run Away, but she titled it Gens qui s’éloignent [People Moving Away] because she prefers accusing others, or maybe her That Person.

Anne Bourse was born in 1982 in Lyon. She lives and works in Paris.

What remains in mind from Anne Bourse’s work are swirling lines and letters, something like burlesque cartoons or psychedelic frescoes that invade the surfaces of books, garments and papers of all types. But even though her practice is varied across different media, including painting, drawing, but also textiles or textual productions, it is above all rhythmed by the continual motion of a writing of the self.

Anne Bourse, Une minute au-dessus de ma tasse de café je ne pense pas à toi, du tout, 2021

Fabric, mirror, alcool pencil, 56 × 40 × 28 cm

Anne Bourse, Une minute au-dessus de ma tasse de café je ne pense pas à toi, du tout, 2021

Fabric, mirror, alcool pencil, 56 × 40 × 28 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Crèvecœur, Paris.