Claire Morel — ISBN 978-2-9540208-8-4 — Martine Aboucaya Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 12 → June 30, 2012

For Claire Morel, written is a picture, the book is an item. It isn’t about denying the meaning borne by words but to feel their materiality : a book is a space, an architecture, a surface that writing occupies, transforms and livens up with its attendance and non-attendance.

Since 2005, Claire Morel designs and publishes books, picturing them, printing them, shaping them, she dilates and contracts the book, spreads it and folds it. Feeling the book’s space is about removing from its perception the linearity, the uniformity and the rules that stepwise established in writing and its support. Claire Morel takes her readers by surprise, questioning their reading habits, she makes them aware that a book is a work which, as every works and every items, is also ruled by its height, its weight and its composition.

For her first solo show with the gallery Martine Aboucaya, ISBN 978-2-9540208-8-4, Claire Morel tackles with her own bookshelf. A book only exists once printed, which is unwaveringly testified by the colophon. Have you ever been asked which book you would bring on a desert island? Claire Morel’s answer is simple, as she collects every colophon of every book of her bookshelf in one book, ISBN 978-2-9540208-8-4, she brings them all.

From her book and her bookshelf, Claire Morel tears writing off the support, ink off the paper. She gathers and spreads the surface of the pages composing her bookshelf, and represents in a very same space the ink used to print ISBN 978-2-9540208-8-4. In the gallery space, the potency of the book is at the same time present and absent, ink, paper and colophon are at the same time united and separate. Broken up, the book no longer exists but as an idea.

Born in 1980, Claire Morel lives and works between Paris and Mulhouse, teaching publication and silkscreen printing at l’école supérieure d’art Le Quai where she studied before entering the FRAC Lorraine as a resident.

ISBN 978-2-9540208-8-4 is published by the gallery Martine Aboucaya.

Happy Hour on March 31st from 6pm to 9pm.