Paul Duro (b. 1953)
What is a Parergon?, 2019

Duro reads Derrida, Kant and laments that the concept of parergon has been unduly reduced to mean just a frame, while historically it was also used in relation to decoration, ornamentation, background, hierarchies of genre – a variety of elements to be contrasted to the main subject matter of the work, ergon. And I find it highly useful for articulation of the red thread in my own experiments – all of them are exploring various aspects of framing. What’s inside and what’s outside the frame, what’s in the foreground and what’s the background; porosity, elasticity and multiplicity of the frames.