Victor Boullet’s paintings are not flashy and certainly aren't trendy in their subject or color. But part of what makes Boullet’s work so exciting is that, like the work of his forebears, it displays that same modernist belief in painting’s form, brushwork, color, and vision. His work relates to Boullet himself, (autobiographical in that what they depict is Boullet in various moods) reacting to a particular context or psychological state and transforming it—not into a concrete image of a place or thing but of himself metamorphosed into the object of his scrutiny. Boullet is the latest incarnation of Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” a flâneur with the jaundiced eye of someone wandering around while recovering from physical or mental trauma. As such, even these supremely banal objects become fraught with significance, transformed into fetishes, or inhabited by ghosts of Boullet’s mind.
Victor Boullet
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