For Ever Blanchot

The current photographs of books represent one strand of an ongoing investigation into the nature of text and image, writing and drawing; works in which the common thread is the rectangle and an inception within some aspect of the printed word, whether block of undifferentiated text, isolated letters, or word/extracts. The very word extract is of interest in its double meaning as both something taken out of context and as distillation of a substance that results in an intensified essence.

The individual photographs are untitled, but the general working theme, inspired by writings of French critic Maurice Blanchot, is ‘the book and the work ‘ (le livre et l’oeuvre). By this we understand that the apprehension of the physical object, the book, has not anything to do with the work of the writer,  which is not even to be located within the book as such. The images of the various books are to scale in each instance, but even that does not allow us to mistake these blurred approximations as the book itself, let alone the work it purports to encompass. The cover images function as one more rectangle within rectangle; allude to the lives and existences of the object, irrespective of their unique titles. The display of a name or title does not give us any more real information on the work; it only betrays a little more information about the book. It does not touch upon the silence of the work.

PH 2023

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