Liber amicorum

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While the book is often the culmination of an artist’s practice, it is less usual for it to become the point of departure for the work itself. Yet that is precisely the case here, where the works of nine visual artists have been brought together to explore the possibilities of layered compositions

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There are a thousand ways in which an artist may engage with books—or be seized by them. One thinks first, prosaically, of exhibition catalogues or monographs; then, more aristocratically, of deluxe editions enriched with a print or an original work; and finally of artists’ books, conceived by their makers as artworks inhabiting the shell of a book. Yet in all these cases, the book is an end point.

By contrast, the works brought together here begin with the pre-existing book, which becomes the support for the artwork—a support less innocent than paper or canvas, one that the artist, in a single gesture, both desacralizes and resacralizes. Do we not believe in the virtues of reincarnation?

Indeed, one marvels that there should once again be a thousand ways of proceeding, of which these pages capture only a few reflections. One may cover the book and alter its status, as clothes make the man (Jean-Christophe Norman or Jean-Charles Blais); one may cut into it to invent new forms of illegibility (Jean-Charles Blais or Georgia Russell); illuminate it (Jochen Gerner), détourne it (Valérie Mréjen or Clémentine Mélois), or augment it (Jean-Michel Alberola or William Kentridge). One may even, as in certain recipes, debone and reconstruct it—a process so subtle that one risks not noticing it at all—but let our readers discover for themselves the drawings of Sharka Hyland.

As for writers, they have no choice but to work upon the book itself: the sedimentation of past readings, the necessary erosion of the book in the making, and finally pedogenesis, when time covers the written thing with dust or oblivion. An entire geology, then, which Olivier Cadiot embraces under the eye and brush of Jochen Gerner, who obscures his text beneath an opaque layer of ink, save for a few outcroppings that bear witness to the richness of what lies beneath. For it was written that this very book would itself become contaminated by its subject…

This publication was produced on the occasion of the exhibition Liber Amicorum, held at the Maison des Arts de Bages from 27 June to 3 September 2026.

The publication is co-published with the Maison des Arts de Bages.

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