Jonas DELABORDE

Jonas Delaborde, 2014

Translated by John Doherty, 2014

Artistic director of Nazi Knife, with Hendrik Hegray, FLTMSTPC, Paris (since 2006) / False Flag, with Hendrik Hegray and Stéphane Prigent, FLTMSTPC, Paris (since 2010) / Mentiras, fanzine (since 2013).

My work comprises several different operations, which are distinct but in dialogue.
On the one hand I make images, in series: drawings, mainly, but also collages and photographs. This iconographic work, and the different ways in which it's elaborated, are infused with permanent sculptural activity. On the other hand, I design publications that are exclusively comprised of images I myself have produced, and others, taken from books or commissioned from guest artists. Their modes of publication vary between self-publication, collaborations and participations in existing collections. But they're all part of the same movement: that of creating conditions for narration.

Drawings of imaginary constructions, photocopies of works on archaeology or rip-offs of punk fanzines are assembled and combined into systems of indices, or coordinates, or decoys. Articulations between images make up one of the specific places of work within the coherent, constrained space of the publication. The nature of the chosen iconographic sources is itself a primary topological outline, which accompanies an important point: an operation of invalidation of cultural categories [...] (the iconography of historical avant-gardes on the same level as printing errors, drawings that trace out a poetics of utopia, along with documents produced, for example, by French right-wing student movements). These juxtapositions structure the chaotic dynamics of the created landscape: a horizontal landscape in which images of violence cover up, as though geologically, those of lost causes. [...] It's a question, literally, of constructing with images and ideas, as one might do with timber and gravel. [...]

The most visible articulation of my work is here, in the double role of draughtsman and publisher. But it also takes other forms. Exhibitions allow me to do murals or combinations of original drawings, sculptures, photocopies of published material and objects found in situ.