Poplar Series (n.d.)

Poplar Hill

All my life, I’ve been drawn to threes. As a child, it was Star Wars, that mythic arc of heroism that unfolded in perfect threefold rhythm. Later, it was Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a story shaped with the inevitability of a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is something human about that structure—something in us that longs for symmetry, for rhythm, for resolution. It’s no surprise then that when I encountered Jef Bourgeau’s Poplar series—three square images arranged like a visual cadence—I felt immediately at home. But the home it offered was not solid ground. It was mist. It was the soft erosion of form into memory.

The Poplar series—comprising Poplar Hill, Poplar Woods, and Blue Poplar—is not a depiction of a forest, but a meditation on perception itself. These works sit in the space between photography, painting, and digital manipulation. They are landscapes, yes, but also memoryscapes: places we have known only in dreams or recollection, rendered with such deliberate ambiguity that we no longer trust what we see. And that, I think, is Bourgeau’s invitation—to see through the image, not into it. To confront how art, like memory, reshapes truth the moment it tries to capture it.

Vision, we often believe, is reliable. We say “I saw it with my own eyes” as a kind of oath. But as any artist or neuroscientist will tell you, vision is a process of interpretation, not transcription. Our brains fill gaps, add emphasis, filter out distractions. What we see is not the world itself, but our mind’s rendering of it. Bourgeau’s Poplar series seems to press right against this threshold. Trees are visible, yes—but only barely. Their outlines blur into fog. Their trunks are more echo than structure. You begin to doubt whether you're looking at something real, or simply the ghost of a place you once knew.

Poplar Hill feels like a breath held in winter. Its palette is spare—white, gray, maybe the faintest touch of lilac. The trees stand like sentinels in a forgotten field, but they are only half-there. In Blue Poplar, color creeps in—not naturalistic, but emotional. The blues are rich, even moody. The trees glow with a kind of internal static, as if lit from some distant grief. And then Poplar Woods offers density, a forest not of forms but of impressions. The image vibrates with vertical energy, the trees multiplied like the lines of a poem that refuses to resolve.

Poplar Woods

What makes these works so arresting isn’t just their subject but their construction. Bourgeau doesn’t simply photograph a stand of poplars—he intervenes. He manipulates. He deconstructs. These are photographs digitally contaminated, edited to the point where the original referent is no longer legible. In this, the Poplar series joins a long tradition of artists who use mixed mediums to subvert certainty. Think of Gerhard Richter, blurring the photograph with a smear of paint. Or the early photo-collages of Hannah Höch, disrupting coherence in service of a deeper truth.

Bourgeau’s work stands squarely—no pun intended—in this lineage, but with a distinctly digital inflection. His art acknowledges the screen as both canvas and context. The square format, so prevalent in this series, is not accidental. It is the shape of Instagram, of avatars, of algorithmic familiarity. These works look good in a feed. They live well on devices. They are both critique and adaptation—a reflection of how art circulates now.

More than that, they raise a compelling question: What happens when the medium itself becomes ambiguous? When we cannot tell what is photograph and what is painting, what is manual and what is machine, does that lessen the truth of the image—or heighten it? I would argue the latter. In the slippage between mediums, we are forced to ask: what exactly are we seeing? And in asking, we begin to really look.

There’s another layer here, one deeply relevant to how art functions in the 21st century. For centuries, art was gatekept—by salons, by curators, by wealthy patrons. Today, artists like Bourgeau operate in a different economy. His works, showcased on his own website, are available to anyone with Wi-Fi. He doesn’t need the sanction of MoMA or Sotheby’s to reach his audience. He has built his own gallery, his own frame. This, too, matters. The internet—despite its noise and speed—has created a space where artists can connect directly with viewers. The relationship is no longer mediated by wealth or geography.

In this, the Poplar series becomes not just a meditation on perception, but a political gesture. It says: you don’t have to visit a museum to feel something. You don’t need a trust fund to own a piece of beauty. Bourgeau’s art is deeply conceptual, but also deeply generous. It is designed to be accessible—not in the sense of simplicity, but in the sense of availability.

His other works reinforce this ethos. Gathering Storm treats clouds not as scenery, but as existential states—digital tempests built of pixels and longing. The Red Canoe evokes isolation and triumph in equal measure: one person, one vessel, pushing beyond familiar waters. And Ophelia, reimagined through a digital lens, floats not in death, but in suspension—part myth, part code. Bourgeau’s art, regardless of subject, always interrogates the interface: between mediums, between minds, between what is real and what is rendered.

Blue Poplar

In the end, Bourgeau’s Poplar series is not about trees. It’s about the fragile act of seeing. It’s about how art—especially when shaped by hybrid mediums—complicates our sense of what is true. It doesn’t offer a forest. It offers the idea of one. It lets you step into the fog with no map, no legend, only the feeling that you’ve been here before, even if you can’t say when.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe in a world overloaded with sharpness, certainty, and spectacle, what we need is a little blur. A little doubt. A little room to ask: what am I really looking at?

Because in that question—not in the answer—is where seeing truly begins.

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See more of his amazing art here: https://detroitmona.wixsite.com/artgarage/artwork