At the court of genuises

Olivier Boissiere - a frenchman in Sofia.

Text by Ivo Hristov

His home is a projection of his personality: beautiful and heteroclite, with shelves filled with enticing publications and an iconostasis with photos of geniuses dear to him. There are five different designer armchairs placed around the table in the sitting room.
I live among the pieces of furniture I still have not sold, Olivier explains humbly and forbids me to make photographs of his chambers. He relishes however in showing me the albums with the creations of his closest friends Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and other Architecture messiahs.
I leaf through the book of the most beautiful houses in the world, written by Boissiere and Anriet Denis. The author stayed at some of these houses to feel their spirit before describing them. So why would he decide to take up residence in Sofia’s paved downtown, in a trite old building on one of Vitosha’s cross streets? So he could sell designer furniture in the native country of the goonbaroque? Sofia is a living, pulsating, exciting city, which makes up for the missed emotions. People like to drink, they still smoke, but unfortunately they have lost the connection with their city and are often disrespectful of their environment. Yet, it is preferable to Bern’s torpid harmony, which depresses him.

Boissiere was born in 1939 near the Normandy shore. He does not hide he is lazy, which in combination with the decomposing ease of studying leads him to give up his education after high school. He delivers books instead. Boissiere serves with the army in troubled Algeria in the years 1960 and 1961. After leaving the service, he finds his dream job in Paris: as a factotum. The privilege of the job lays with the employer, the boy prodigy of the French art critique in the 60’s Pierre Restany. The communication with the geniuses is the greatest prerequisite for the young Olivier who cleans, carries the mail and canisters for Christo’s first art installations while being exposed to Yves Klein’s, Cy Twombly’s and Larry Rivers’ paintings. What’s the value of lectures when you have the opportunity to listen to Restany’s endless monologs and follow Raymond Hains in his night-long peregrinations?

In the 70’s Boissiere travels to Moscow, Tokyo, and Aspen as an Industrial design expert; his comments are published in magazines such as Domus and Architecture d’aujourd’hui. His taste for the Architecture sprouts. In the height of Postmodernism Olivier travels North America from end to end imbibing with his senses and analyzing with his European criterion the American artists’ work.

Boissiere meets with Frank Gerhy in 1972. He still regrets not writing a monograph on the maestro, but it is too late now. We are too close and he reacts painfully to all my critics, sighs Olivier remembering with a smile the strange conversations he has had with Gehry and the palette of diverse grunting with which the genius listens to his contributors’ opinions.

By the way, the United States has fallen into complete stagnation presently, Boissiere says curtly. While the whims of the young Dutch architects and their taste for the modest luxury fascinate him. Spain is the other laboratory of the new architecture. He is explicit about the future: energy is today’s imperative. The time of the four equal facades and the giant internal volumes is over. We will rediscover trends, will adapt to solar emissions and winds.

In 1982 Destiny introduces him to Jean Nouvel. The common background, the similar worldview and the love of art immediately bring them together. Olivier contributes to his projects with his personal opinions, analysis and documents. Boissiere is able to transform images into words, to deduce the meaning of the vision. The abundance of images and atrophy of the language weighs him down. To soak in our culture, images should be transformed in words, sighs the critic under his Mephistophelean curled up eyebrows and points at Shakespeare’s verse on a wall in the showroom: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Ivo Hristov was born in Istanbul. He is a lawyer. His career as a journalist takes him to RFI, Nova TV and BBT. He has worked as a translator for André Gide, Marguerite Duras, Romain Gary, Frédéric Begbédé.
Ivan Hristov has had his work published in L’Europeo, Tema, and Sega. He is the author of the political biography of François Mitterrand, Mitterand between Voltaire and Rousseau (1991)