Éditions d'artiste

« Joëlle Dautricourt has shown how a book can become poetic even though she has reduced textuality to its title : « Sentences », appearing on the front and back covers and, in different typographies, on the title page. The author of posters covered with words, Dautricourt uses « sentences » in the grammatical sense even though francophone readers of this volume printed in Paris would interpret « sentences » as judgments or maxims, but never as a grammatically self-contained unit. Reduced to its title, the book fails to provide « sentences » of any sort whatever meaning we ascribe to this word. Ambiguity and absence initiate a poetic atmosphere compounded by inusual graphics. Instead of the expected « sentences », the artist has neatly distributed on every page of the book sequences of prehistoric silex tools and weapons, functioning in much the same manner as Max Ernst’s and Tim Ely’s visually impressive imaginary scripts. We feel somehow that these rhythmically juxtaposed paleolithic fragmentations must yield an inveterate meaning. After all, people thousands of years ago had shaped and repeatedly used them, thus putting something of themselves into them. By her arrangement of these stones asserting their three-dimensional presence on thick beige paper, Dautricourt has created recurrent and contrasting patterns suggestive of typographic designs. No two pages look alike. Sometimes a single line of silexes occupies the center, at others a host of tools and weapons, substituting for letterpress, cover an entire page. In the middle of the book, the silexes come into their own as works of art. A fringed black banner moving across two pages displays in chiaroscuro a rhythmic sequence of shaped stones. Joined to the faint black traces covering the rest of the two pages, the tools and weapons, doubling as notes in a score, create a visual impression close to music : the synesthesic song of the silex. »

Renée Riese Hubert & Judd D. Hubert

in The Cutting Edge of Reading : Artists’ Books (page 189)

by Renée Riese Hubert & Judd D. Hubert.

Granary Books – New York City – 1999.

 FORMULES

Variations sur les Formules Graphiques.

44 pages sur papier 120 grammes, 19,5 X 14,5 cm.

Couverture offset sur Rives Tradition 250 grammes.

Cousu à la main, 10 exemplaires numérotés et signés.

Livre d'artiste, 1997.

© Joëlle Dautricourt. All rights reserved.

- Consultable au Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale de France à Paris.