Beautiful and voluptuous, tactile. Such is the exhibit of Borchgrave's paper art on display at the Legion of Honor.  A hard seed though, of the uncanny, pokes at me as a I walk through the compact exhibit. Here are beautiful gowns and jewels of Bronzino's Eleanor of Toledo, historical, complete, but stiff and mummified and slightly cartoonish in the rendering of the real, which is in itself fantastical to our modern eyes.


Each interpretation is a museum piece come to life as another museum piece, a transference of 2d documentation writ large and slightly dis-remembered from the original into a 3d paper mache, displacing the copy with cutout copies that are slightly stiff and visibly lossy.


In opposition to the showier and more ornamental dresses, in themselves reflective of ornamentation as a function of the originals, certain experiments blend material and construction in a way that loses the qualities of neither. One cape in particular suits the materiality as an origami monolith, a folded, spacial mobius garment that sweeps from the floor into a magician's hood (shown briefly in video 4 from the back.)


Borchgrave's artisty shows best in the details: lenspaper "fabric" recalling burnout velvets and silks, pleated constructions a la Fortuny, or intricate lacework built up from corrugated papers like a messy nest made by fractal avians.