Borer (Alain) : Dürer. Le burin du graveur
He had written to Heller : "If you keep this painting clean, it will remain clean and fresh for five hundred years...". Dürer makes a date in the year 2000. Now that we have reached the announced deadline, what remains to be written about Dürer ? Interrogate this remainder : each one can go there of its compilation.
It took a skilled cartographer to place the rich cluster of the Dürer galaxy five centuries away in our sky, and to combine the lines of his master constellation before our eyes : the Burin of the engraver.
2021 / 11,5x16 cm / 128 p. / ISBN : 978-2-85035-027-6
This is a very legitimate question that inaugurates Le Burin du graveur, published for the first time forty years ago as an introduction to an edition of L’Œuvre gravé complet (Hubschmidt & Bouret, 1980). Citing the studies of Pierre du Colombier, Paul Vaisse and Erwin Panofksy, which he calls his "materials," as his starting points, Alain Borer openly embarks on a tour d’horizon ; and it is armed with considerable erudition and a fertile spirit of synthesis that he reshapes, rearranges and reveals the main lines of the Dürer constellation.
It is therefore difficult to summarize this study, which could well be in the image of the painter himself : monographic, certainly, just as the author of self-portraits marking the end of the Middle Ages "awareness of the individual", the "exaltation of personality" and the "mirror stage of painting" wants to be unique and inimitable ; but above all, it is profuse, effervescent, as are the interests and facets of the Renaissance man.
We will discover or rediscover Dürer as a traveler, observer and chronicler in his writings and drawings ; as a collector with "curiosity in all directions" ; as an avid discoverer but not avaricious of his discoveries ; as an astrologer and characterist ; as a pioneer theorist ; but also an innovator in his profession, a maniacal painter, obsessed by "technical perfection and the very idea of beauty" ; a goldsmith ; at the same time "a humanist, pious and Lutheran, a good husband and a good citizen, as wise as a picture" and an author of letters overflowing with gaudiness and bawdiness...
A work, in short, that far from reducing Dürer to the thin line of a clear line, fleshes out to account for his greatness.
The poet, author, essayist and novelist Alain Borer was born in 1949 in Luxeuil-les-Bains. His fame depends above all on his qualities as a world specialist of Arthur Rimbaud. For thirty years, he devoted himself to poetry and to the study of the poet. He published several articles, wrote books and essays about him and went on his tracks through the world, especially during a trip to Ethiopia, thus going through all the places of Rimbaldie and keeping his findings in his rimbaldothèque.
After the centenary of Rimbaud’s death, Alain Borer, who is also an art teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Tours, started a second phase in his work. He published a novel, Koba, where the reader attends a real hunt to the gods in a universe halfway between myths and History, then a play and, still, poems in lyrical cosmic alleys, pataphysical books, and what he calls "noèmes". Then, in his story Le Ciel & la carte, this writer-traveler invites us to discover the "water people" aboard a boat through the South Seas, between hell and paradise.
