AG is well-named: it would be hard to mistake it for anyone else’s work but @bogue_profumo Antonio Gardoni’s.

On my first wearing of AG, I kept thinking I should be thinking about visiting a gallery, picturing myself walking through the rooms of an artist’s retrospective (fanning myself with the brochure, absorbing the chronological narrative.) Yes, absolutely, from the atrium, I can see the reflections of past work casting colour on the walls but AG is neither an assemblage of leftovers nor a guided tour through the Bogue archives.

Nothing so predictable. It’s trilobites and masks and wooden tigers and embroidery and netsuke and rocketships. It’s war canoes and silver boot hooks and dodo skulls and mottled mirrors and a plump apricot. A jar of earth, a jar of honey. And yes, the shards of light falling on the floor. AG is full of light.

But I do get happily overwhelmed in museums. It’s not just the immense collections. I get distracted by the fossils in the stone floors, the fuzz of flocked wallpaper behind heavy gilt frames, light warped across parquet by bullseye glass, the fingerprints embedded in a bronze age clay bowl, the notes on the back of a photograph, the scooped textures of wear on marble stairs, the mournful expression of a cracked porcelain lion. I love these extra worlds, and the endless stories created by juxtaposition and transition, the new tales you can spin by taking a different route.

This is what AG feels like to me. It’s a perfume to inhabit and explore, following the falls of light through interlocking spaces. There’s dream geography at work: this door opens to a different room every time. Last night there was an orchard, today there’s a pharmacy. Tomorrow, who knows? But I’ll keep stepping through that door to find out.

Here’s to another ten years. I can’t wait to see what will emerge in another decade of Bogue.

originally posted 30 December 2021