n°57 — Pontus Hulten. Author : Malou Messien
end of 2025
More infos to come
n°57 — Pontus Hulten. Author : Malou Messien
end of 2025
More infos to come
n°02 — A technical platform: Colorlibrary.ch by Maximage. Author: Manon Bruet
Sold Out
Author: Manon Bruet
12 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, black and cyan + 1 A2 poster, 3 PMS
+ 1 A2 poster, CMYK (reserved for subscribers) (sold out)
8th November 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
Sold Out
Author: Manon Bruet
12 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, black and cyan + 1 A2 poster, 3 PMS
+ 1 A2 poster, CMYK (reserved for subscribers) (sold out)
8th November 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
The Workflow research project, run by Tatiana Rhis, Guy Meldem, and Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee (Maximage) at the Écal, is interested in current technologies of the printed object. It consists of a series of experiences that attempt to circumvent currently available production technologies, provoking coincidences and accidents with the goal of obtaining new outcomes.
More than simply questioning the possible circumvention of tools, Workflow explores technicality, modes of functioning, and flaws. In this way, the programme pursues the field of experimentation opened up by the Swiss studio Maximage since 2008. In the context of their degree project at the Écal, Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee already combined manual and digital techniques so as to develop their own production tools, and notably their own printing methods. From their experiments have emerged, among other things, the Programme typeface, and the Les impressions magiques publication, that appears today as a manifest object of their approach.
One of the first results of the Workflow programme has been the creation of a series of colorimetric profiles that allows the conversion of digital images for printing with one, two, three, four, or five accompanying colors, whether they are basic (CMYK), pastels, fluorescent, or metallic.
The work on these profiles has two aims. It serves to increase the awareness of students at the Écal with regard to the management and theory of color, but it also allows, for the first time, the automation of operations and settings that have until now been done on a case-by-case basis through the manual use of image-editing software and CAD.
Advocating an “innovative” and “professional” solution for the treatment of color, the Écal and the Workflow programme launched the website colorlibrary.ch in 2016 and offered the profiles for sale. The platform appears as an online library that presents a large variety of profiles with different colorful combinations. The different profiles are displayed on screen, applied to images by Iranian photographer Shirana Shahbazi; they seem to replay the codes of Photoshop type images–from the butterfly to the eye, the still life to the waterfall.
Beginning with an analysis of the structure of this platform, the aesthetic and terminological languages that it summons, and their limits, we will open a number of fields of investigation, more widely linked to the question of the tools and modes of production of images.
n°25 — Exhibition views? Jonathan Monk. Author: Remi Parcollet
Author: Remi Parcollet
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
24th October 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
Author: Remi Parcollet
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
24th October 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
Photographs of works of art in an exhibition or studio setting, enlarged to the size of the wall, have become an essential and increasingly systematic element of contemporary museography. The institutional curator accompanied by his or her set designer, and the independent curator, both use them as much to recontextualize works as for their aesthetic qualities as documentary images that have become immersive and reflexive.
The obviously richer relationship that artists have with these unique images reveals in various ways what is currently at stake in the act of exhibiting.
To create a kind of retrospective of his work, in 2016 Johnathan Monk debuted a series of exhibitions entitled Exhibit Model*, which consisted of covering the walls of the exhibition space with archive photographs that documented his work in different contexts over the last 20 years. Marie J. Jean considers these staged exhibition views as a form of augmented reality: “This manner of considering the exhibition, in other words, of exhibiting the work along with the context of its appearance, reminds us that the work of art “is a place”, “establishes a place”, is “a has taken place**”.
However for Johnathan Monk, who often uses the work of other artists, isn’t it simply a way in which to appropriate his own work?”
Jonathan Monk, «Exhibit Model Four», 2019 Kindl, Berlin. Photographie: Jens Ziehe. A1 format poster printed in CMYK on blue back paper
n°04 — A communication: invitation cards by the artist Stanley Brouwn. Author: Céline Chazalviel
Author: Céline Chazalviel.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A1 poster, CMYK (reserved for subscribers or on demand)
6th December 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
Author: Céline Chazalviel.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A1 poster, CMYK (reserved for subscribers or on demand)
6th December 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
If we could attribute to Stanley Brouwn a desire to dissociate his artistic production from who he is and to reveal otherness through the mastery of his image and that of his work, we could also divine an intention to focus the public’s attention on his exhibitions. Behind the standards put in place for the communication related to his exhibitions—the use of lowercase and Helvetica exclusively, the refusal to reproduce images of his work, to produce (or allow production of) written commentary on the subject of the same work, to appear in the context of a vernissage or even to answer an interview—the artist builds his identity by way of ellipses. Since his participation in documenta 5 (1972), the stories linked to this attitude have come to draw the outlines of an artistic posture that goes beyond any one particular case. The invitation cards for his solo exhibitions provide a symptomatic example: set almost exclusively in Helvetica, the absence of uppercase, flying in the face of the graphic identity of the gallery or the host institution, they seem impossible to date, give or take twenty years.
This mastery reveals that graphic and typographic choices represent one of the spaces of neutrality built by Brouwn, like other artists and theoreticians of his generation, and generations that came after. According to one of the positions of Sol Lewitt, “conceptual artists are more mystical than rationalist,” and the case of Brouwn gives weight to this idea. Whether it be by way of a mediation adopted by the artist himself and the relationship with the institution that it entails, that of the myth of the autonomy of the artwork, of the relationship with documentation, with commentary and the analysis of an artwork or even the conditions of reception, Brouwn escapes the category of the conceptual artist and incites us to measure the contemporary echoes of his radicality.