By: Jorge Valdes-Pages for ART SOURCE, 1993

Jef Bourgeau: Not at all.

JV-P: I’ve seen reviews that could prove it.

JB: I’m very much at peace with what I do.

JV-P: Is that the same as being asleep on the job?

JB: My vision has always been consistent and unfaltering.

JV-P: Are you saying it’s not the same?

JB: Can we move on?

JV-P: I’m making you uncomfortable. I’m sorry.

JB: Look we can talk about whatever you like.

JV-P: Fine. Your biography states they you’re bisexual.

JB: That was a typo we chose not to correct. For obvious reasons. It simply reads better. It was meant to say that I’m ambidextrous.

JV-P: I see. Do you paint right or left then?

JB: Either and neither. I deny any political content. Whichever suits me at the moment. Although, I’m beginning to think my left-handed work tends more toward the abstract while my right more to realism.

JV-P: How exactly do you start a painting?

JB: I hear a voice in here. I’m my head. Telling me what to do.

JV-P: Whose voice is it?

JB: Mine of course.

JV-P: You’ve recently started a new series. What you call THE NEW REAL. What’s it telling you now? This voice in your head, I mean?

JB: Hitler hat jahrzehntelang in der Holler geschmort, zur Basse fur mein Taten.

JV-P: What’s all that mean?

JB: I have no idea. I don’t know any German.

JV-P: How can you be inspired then?

JB: I suppose it’s the tone of the voice that does it.

JV-P: You once said you’d like to make sense. To say what you want. But then you would no longer be an artist.

JB: To be an artist you must first lose the gift of speech.

JV-P: Is it a gift?

JB: Only when spoken to.

JV-P: Otherwise?

JB: Shut up.

JV-P: Pretty rigid.

JB: If nothing else, grammar has taught me discipline.

JV-P: Why go on then? If you have nothing more to say?

JB: Don’t get me wrong. I still have plenty to say. I’m bursting. Only now pigment has become my alphabet, my antidote for language. And with each brushstroke I try to check my habits of speaking, to counter them. I try to be unfamiliar with what I am saying.

JV-P: Is that the same as finding meaning where there is none?

JB: Quite the opposite. It’s finding nothing where there is only meaning.

JV-P: In other words?

JB: Pure painting.