Douglas Bourgeois: Disparate Situation

Douglas Bourgeois... Home Of The Brave (2006, collage and oil on illustration board). From Douglas Bourgeois: Disparate Situation at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, LA. "...Bourgeois chose 'Disparate Situation' as the title for his exhibition because juxtaposition and clashing between elements kept becoming manifest in the collages. Bourgeois has created collages most of his life but has rarely exhibited them. The artist feels that collagist methods have been an undercurrent in his paintings for a long time. Collage is like sketching for Bourgeois and often serves as the best method for him to find routes to the subconscious and ineffable mysteries of existence.
Bourgeois's meticulously rendered work reveals an incredible craftsmanship wedded with a mysterious ability to express the artist's vision through obsessive attention to detail. He combines his technical rigor with a far ranging grasp of the iconography of late 20th and early 21st century culture. As noted by art historian Isabelle Loring Wallace, Bourgeois 'purposefully adopts certain hallmarks of an unsophisticated, self-taught esthetic—frontality, inconsistent scale, awkward perspective, the absence of facture, brilliant color—often deploying them in conjunction with references and motifs (voodoo, oil refineries, local musicians) that mark him as the product of a specific place. Yet his choice of subject matter and theme just as often exceeds and undermines the regionalism to which he seems to subscribe.'"