Drypoint engravings on plexiglass, artist books
Several projects
« A fragile line carved into a matrix »
Media : Drawing , Artist Book, Participatory
Themes : Body
The hand that engraves is not the same as the one that draws on paper. Faced with these two materials, the body changes its posture, the tools change, the line changes. With drypoint, the hand attacks the surface of the Plexiglas through an accumulation of small gestures. Each incision raises burrs along the edges of the engraved line — traces of the material’s resistance, memories of what has been torn away. There is something obsessive in this attempt to inscribe a fragile, delicate line into a hard and rigid surface. A line that is often curvilinear, nervous, awkward. A stroke that hesitates, insists, almost wounds itself in order to exist.
Then comes the paper. I almost breathe it in before looking at it. Its texture, smell and density already tell a story before the drawing even appears. The drawing does not simply settle onto its surface: it enters into a dialogue with it. Nothing is entirely predetermined. The image takes shape through an improvised conversation with the matrix, in the back-and-forth between the engraved hollow and what rises to the surface.
My subject is the body — or rather, bodies.
December 22, 2007, Paris. Sitting in the metro, facing strangers, their faces seem so foreign to me — perhaps even more so because I am myself a stranger in a city full of strangers. I try to memorize a profile, the curve of a cheek, the line between an ear and a nose. I trace imaginary lines in my mind, but as soon as I look away, the face is already gone. So I tell myself that, with a little luck, these bodies will return later in a drawing, at the moment I least expect them.
When I draw a body, the real subject almost immediately disappears. I am no longer looking at a person: I become the path of a line. An infinite line that slips between forms, follows volumes, sometimes distorting reality. The body becomes a territory of transformation. I am interested in the limits of the body, the extreme body: extremely thin, extremely obese, amputated, repaired, augmented, constrained, traversed by prostheses or additions. The body as an unstable space, in perpetual negotiation with itself.
These heightened engravings often take the form of artist’s books. I am as interested in the book as an object as I am in what it contains: its structure, its physiology, its ability to produce meaning through manipulation. I think of the book as a body in itself — with its joints, openings, resistances, and possibilities for unfolding. Each project seeks to push its limits a little further. The meaning of the work is never completely fixed: it becomes activated through handling, through a shifting, open reading that reinvents itself with every viewer.
Medium / date
Drypoint engravings on Plexiglas, hand-coloured, artist’s books — 2010–ongoing.
→ See also : Rétinades — Family Album