The Wordless Black
From the abyss I swell up like the blossom of a spring morning
From where I grow is a riddle worth abandoning
I see the light but it does not touch me, for I am blacker than carbon, and this too is revealed as a lie
I visit a thousand hues, yet I go nowhere
Stumble across crevices that hold no substance for me
And as I walk the glacial tops of glorious heights, this too crumbles to delight
2018
Le Noir Sans Mots
De l’abîme j’enfle comme la fleuraison d’un matin de printemps
D’où je grandis est une énigme qui vaut d’être abandonné
Je vois la lumière mais elle ne me touche pas,
Car je suis noir comme le carbone,
Et ceci se révèle aussi être un mensonge
Je visite mille teintes, pourtant je ne vais nulle part
Trébuche au travers de crevasses qui ne contiennent aucune substance pour moi
Et en traversant les cimes glaciales de hauteur glorieuse
Ceci aussi s’effondre en délice
2018
Stranger than fiction… ; or the hemogoblin dance.
Stranger than fiction,
a call from the wild,
time to return to cliches,
through to the camera obscura,
and with that the umbilical chord that penetrated it.
The embrace,
the collapse,
return,
return,
eternally,
mein wanderers.
We have become mass consumers of our own minds,
in cerebrum malls,
a distant, subtle yet burning self loathing permeating the substances,
in the canals of our subtlest bodies.
Pirates in gondolas.
The neurotic throb,
subterranean in jolly tourists.
Yet we skip, chorus like,
miss the nomad.
That gracefully receives the refusal,
time and time again,
the snub,
the chronic snubbing.
To take a look,
a look,
just one,
which might suffice to bring down the glacial palaces of suspended scintillants,
forever recharging the transparent pipe of hard anaemia inducing rocks.
And the irony is,
if perceived,
and our times are for that seeing,
as always reinforced with the solid concrete blocks of a hypocrisy,
so crisp it has turned white with thresholds surpassed…
silicon to plasma.
And again love finds me,
on this conquering waxing gibous night,
peace,
yes, peace,
again,
welcome,
a middle so gentle,
so finely balanced.
That even the demons are suffused to a surrender, oh so molecular,
swaying at the hips.
Slow motion,
white rock’n roll,
beige rock an roll,
warm,
powdery,
10 thousand frames a second,
superimposition,
morphing,
a second,
gushing duplication, a retina can’t fathom,
and this it’s bliss,
and peace again.
Thank you.
Copyright, 2014.
Becoming Intense
The molecular is the dynamic motion of a given event or moment, the life force or the atomic direction. If one was to imagine a dog in a park, or more precisely a dog in relation to a squirrel up a tree, at this point focused solely on the physical behaviour of the dog, its dance or gesture, its intense crisp muscular tension, as it stares like a frozen image in the direction of the squirrel up a tree, then we might envisage its incredible slow fluid movement as it advances in slow motion closer to the tree like a lioness in the jungle observing its prey. The dog’s, then sudden, and immediate barking excitement, running round the tree only to pause again like an inanimate object, the perfect work of a taxidermist, or without wanting to spark any irony, a ‘molar’ entity. If one was to focus only on the movement of this encounter or coming into ‘proximity’ with a squirrel and tree, if one could look at this intense dance and somehow remove all the recognisable references of the event, such as fur, teeth, barking, bark, leaves, grass, muscle, organs, then what would be left would be the molecular, and the encounter in between the dog and the squirrel a becoming molecular, a becoming intense.
2008.
A Biography
Born in London, 1979, to an English father and French mother.
First time I was taken to a restaurant I started to cover the window with spaghetti.
Went to a bilingual school from the age of five. On the weekends I would always go to the countryside.
One time I was climbing a tree, which was not unusual. I was almost at the top – I remember this tree being very high up – and as I reached for the next branch my foot slipped and I fell. As I fell backwards out of this tree my speed was slowed and my fall cushioned every half a metre by a branch, continuously until I reached the ground, softly. Although I fell about five or six metres onto my back it felt like just one, and the ground was soft. It was as if the tree had guided me down with its many hands and I almost wanted to do it again.
When I was 11 or 12, I was reading Terry Pratchett and burst into uncontrollable laughter on my bed.
When I was 14 I went to live in the country in France with my family. A year later we moved again. One night, I sat in my new empty room of white walls and I cried.
Once I got stuck in the dark with two friends. We thought we saw a boar’s eyes so we all ran up a tree. The tree started to sway more and more, it was going to break so we legged in the darkness towards the light. Halfway I fell into a metre-deep puddle.
At school I studied Fine Art and French literature.
When I was 19 I came back to do a foundation course at Chelsea.
Years later I was skint and waiting at a bus stop about 12 at night. The red ticket machine swallowed my pound but didn’t give me a ticket. I started kicking the shit out of the machine with excessive clumsy Karate Kid-esque movements swearing out loud. Wether or not this provided entertainment to the 25 or so people also waiting I don’t know. I thought after, that in that instant I had become the ‘type’ of person I had been warned about as a child.
I make audio-visual performance pieces. Some of the concerns behind my work are the repression and expression of emotion within our social masquerade and the possibilities of movement between fixed generic codification.
2009.
NICOLAS OSBORN 