Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

MATHIEU K. ABONNENC
PIERRE LEGUILLON
YANN SéRANDOUR
Sans Tambours ni trompettes, 2012. Photography : Yann Sérandour.
Les Prairies's artists
Co-Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Cabinet du livre d'artiste.
Avec le soutien de
l'entreprise Self Signal.
Just to prove that, in the words of Mallarmé, "everything in the world exists in order to end up as
a book", Yann Sérandour's part in this concerns the first stage in the existence of books: making
the paper. In his installation at the Newway Mabilais he conjures up both the experiments of the
brilliant scientist-printer David Séchard in Balzac's Lost Illusions and the ancestral Japanese
marbling technique of suminagashi. A teaching aid – a textbook on the history of papermaking
published in 1954 in Japan – is used as a matrix. Its marbled flyleaf is blown up to the exact
dimensions of the Cabinet du Livre d’Artiste (CLA). The eight windows of the venue are each
covered by the corresponding part of the image. From that moment on, the CLA becomes a
predetermined area comparable to a page of a book and the artists' intervention is the response
to a problem of page layout, converted to the three dimensions of the venue's architecture.
First on the blank paper are images, old photo prints from press agencies. These are supplied
by Pierre Leguillon who collected them over the years. They are pictures of American mobile
libraries from the 1950s. Then comes the text: notes, dates and captions inscribed by Mathieu
K. Abonnenc directly onto the Perspex of the windows, following the curves of the marbling on
the paper and creating a historical frieze whose rigour is thwarted by the random nature of the
papermaking technique. By working in layers, each one of which corresponds to one of the artists,
to one medium and one level of interpretation, Yann Sérandour, Pierre Leguillon and Mathieu K.
Abonnenc create a historical fabric in the microcosm of the space of a window.
A. N. tr. J.H.
retrouvez ces artistes au Cabinet du livre d’artiste
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