Jack Burton‘s Book Presentation: For a Fool Such as I (me)
“For a Fool Such as I (me)” is Jack Burton's first book, published by Balazsi Gallery in the context of the Mallorca PhotoFest. It brings together ten years of his artistic practice across different series, organised around a non-exhaustive abecedary of concepts inspired by Gilles Deleuze's Abécédaire: an eight-hour interview with Claire Parnet, published at the philosopher's request after his death in 1996, in which Deleuze unfolds the core of his thought through words, concepts, and, at times, proper names. Some letters are missing. Others repeat. The texts can be read in any order. A structure loose enough to get lost in.
The conversation at the Auditori of Es Baluard Museu opened with a question that went to the heart of the project: now that the book exists as a physical object, now that it can be held and leafed through, how does the abecedary change the way Burton reads his own work and his own archive of images? What does it mean to organise a decade of practice around concepts rather than chronology or series?
Burton reflected on how the process had revealed unexpected connections within his own work: the way everything could be linked to everything else, and how his practice had always been driven by a search for those connections without a predetermined destination. The abecedary, he noted, had made something visible that had always been there but had never been named so explicitly.
The presentation moved through a selection of entries from the book, among them Affect, Doubt, Fool and World, tracing the questions and tensions that each letter opens onto and the way they speak to one another across the work.
"I tend to think of a studio as the closest thing to a world in the making." The presentation closed with a reflection on the studio as a space of accumulation: temporary scenes built to be photographed and later archived, ruins of past worlds and new ones emerging among them. We inhabit small bubbles mediated by images, and the world always seems to exceed our capacity to fully comprehend it. Perhaps this is why Jack's photographs are almost always uninhabited, yet what remains outside the frame never fully disappears. The world continues beyond the image.
Auditori, Es Baluard Museu, Palma, 2026