n°56 — Graphic Designers as Iconographers. Author: Thierry Chancogne
End of 2025
More infos to come
n°56 — Graphic Designers as Iconographers. Author: Thierry Chancogne
End of 2025
More infos to come
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.
n°08 — A residency: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé at Villa Medici. Author: Thierry Chancogne
Interview with Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé by Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm,
+ 1 A2 poster, black and white (reserved for subscribers or on demand)
07 February 2018
ISBN : 979-10-95991-05-2
ISSN : 2558-2096
Interview with Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé by Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm,
+ 1 A2 poster, black and white (reserved for subscribers or on demand)
07 February 2018
ISBN : 979-10-95991-05-2
ISSN : 2558-2096
Typo-topographic records
While still a student in the Ésad Valence, Coline Sunier, along with Grégory Ambos, created a striking front cover for the booklet associated with the Zak Kyes programme, Forms of Inquiry, using a series of jewels sampled from the more or less heraldic graphic patrimony of highly local emblems.
When she founded her studio with Charles Mazé, the duo continued the work of collection, which is at the same time one of the etymologies of reading, and one of the characteristics of the conceptual aesthetic of the list that emerged in the 1970s—first, in the re-casting of the Ésad Valence’s identity in 2012-2013; then in the work created during a residency at the Villa Médicis, Come vanno le cose?, dedicated to records of 1,512 graffiti found on the walls of Rome illustrating the portrait of a mysterious survivor, perhaps imagined, of the Red Brigades; and more recently in the identity developed for the Centre d’art contemporain in Brittany.
The collection of signs of power and the traces of resistance profoundly inscribed in the always political matter of the spaces is often accompanied by an attempt at typographic translation bringing to mind the work of typification in the personal writings of Fernand Baudin, created for the catalogue of the eponymous prize in 2012.
n°19 — A history: graphic designer-publishers. Author: Thierry Chancogne
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
5th February 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
5th February 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062
In 1275, the kingdom of France ruled on the rights of stationarii (copyists) and librarii (librairies, the French for “bookshop”), newly emancipated from the yoke of the Church (Friedrich Karl von Savigny (author and publisher), Histoire du droit romain au moyen âge, Tome III, Charles Hingray, Paris, 1839 (1815), p. 415). The main question was and has always been, even before the invention of printing, the regulation of the circulation of writing, and the designation of those responsible for their inscription and distribution.
Robin Kinross identified the emergence of the modern figure of the typographer in the 17th century, with The doctrine of handy-works: applied to the art of printing by Joseph Moxon (Robin Kinross, Modern typography: An Essay in Critical History, Hyphen Press, London, 2004 (1992) pp. 15-16). But long before this, graphic artists, copyists, and typographers such as Geoffroy Tory and Henri Estienne the elder were both booksellers and publishers who gave much thought to their practice and the contents that they released into the public space.
It would seem that the time has come to reassess this ancient tradition, with more and more graphic artists and designers choosing to establish their own publishing houses in order to defend their editorial approach in both senses of the word—that of “editing” and the choice and organization of graphic material, but also in the sense of “publishing”, applying a certain ethic to the distribution and advertising of the contents.