For those who don’t know him already – and it’s difficult to imagine anyone who doesn’t – you might picture him as one of Töpffer’s characters – prominent chin, and a pointed nose underneath a pair of metal-framed glasses. A short goatee beard, sniffing out an invisible incunable, which to his mind is perfectly real. He might speak to you of the ancient book he has just purchased, or of one that a friend, an erudite and resourceful collector had shown him and had just managed to acquire before him. He grunts, laughs and looks at you, rubs his hands together and takes on a truly Mephistophelian air.

Old books or old papers – one leads to the other. He seeks them out, adding to his collection, brings them together, cuts them up and puts them back into circulation. It’s a kind of wonderfully perspicacious digestion process, which leads him through medical and religious publications and other family souvenirs passed down over the centuries. To these oeuvres he adds his own shapes perhaps stones or vegetable matter from the depths of time or from a future without nature.

He hardly speaks of his drawings if at all. If he shows them to you, it’s only to burst out laughing at the look on your face. What really interests him are images of a type we no longer see, materials that have been forgotten, habits, ways of thinking and protocols, which we know nothing about today. Undoubtedly they still had meaning before the war…

He is obsessed by “contrived albums”. These books are exclusively made up of images collected by their authors. One example amongst others is the “album” created by Hannah Hoch around 1933 and published in 2004 by Hatje-Cantz. These albums form an inexhaustible source of ammunition to fight against the things he instinctively detests: the established order, good taste, and consensus – awful things. A world without knowledge, without curiosity, without a hearty snigger and one devoid of the somewhat vulgar pleasure to be procured though a “huge” joke.

 His drawings are like unpredictable nasty little traps: their fuses are twisted and generally short. “My hatred know no bounds” he wrote in Bouts, his book of aphorisms and drawings published 3 years ago by the Atelier de bibliophilie populaire. We have to take him at his word subject to the fact that this hatred extends to everything without exception.

 The result, is an accumulation of catastrophes and ruins of which he creates an inventory. A sort of inventory… Gangues in the colors of ceremonial coats, mineralized, secreted as if through despair in the face of mortal danger. Animals and beings, struck by panic, frozen by fear. Ghosts of marbled paper. Reluctant substances transformed in the same way as pearls or coral (1). In short, these are all objects torn from their context by the destructive force of the collector (Walter Benjamin – Berlin Childhood) turned artist with his new form of classification, a devil behind a new set of truths.     

Fabrice Hergott

(1) Echoing the drawings of Guillaume Dégé, an object created by the sculptor/ceramist Ron Nagle (B. 1939: San Francisco) is presented as part of the exhibition.