Mike Bouchet: Private Idano

SARIEV Contemporary, Plovdiv is delighted to present “Private Idano”, Mike Bouchet’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. 

The exhibition Private Idano presents a focused selection of recent works from 2015-2017. These works relate to Bouchet’s interest in the power of mass image production, the application of behavioral suggestion, social controls, celebrity culture, the provocation of private desire and the history of baroque painting.

The paintings and drawings in the exhibition are part of an ongoing series referred to by the artist as “Tapestry Cartoons”. This series was started in 2004. The artist collages posters from commercial film advertisements, and then produces paintings and drawings from these collages. The transfer of the promotional information onto more traditional materials synthesizes the seemingly oppositional pictures into an uncanny new artwork that both reinforces and undermines the power of the source image.

The title of the exhibition, “Private Idano”, (pronounced “I Dunno”), is a twist of the phrase “Private Idaho”. This is an English language joke about someone who is off in their own mental state. It can be a temporary trance state; or a general longstanding mood; or even about an individual who is practically insane. It means being in some other mind “state” that is far away. The artist feels strongly that the contemporary landscape, with all its conflicting fictions and realities, engenders this type of mindset across much of the modern life. Private Idano refers to the idea that privately, in our deepest thoughts, that we are not quite sure about our day to day decisions, and that our individual sense of reality is possibly ungrounded; a feeling that is a “private I-don’t-know”.