Martine Lacas
Ecrivain
Martine Lacas a publié deux livres d’art aux éditions du Seuil Au fond de la peinture, pour une poétique de l’arrière plan (2008) et Désir et peinture ( 2012). Outre une activité régulière d’enseignement dans diverses universités parisiennes, elle écrit pour la presse spécialisée et des textes critiques. Son travail sur la peinture et la photographie lui ont ouvert la voie de l’écriture littéraire. Son livre Désir et peinture en porte la trace dans la mesure où il s’affranchit des codes du genre par le tressage qui s’y opère entre écriture romanesque et histoire de l’art au sens strict : le questionnement de la représentation picturale y emprunte les voies de la fiction pour découvrir et dire ce qui, sans elle, se dérobe à tout discours sur la peinture.
Les Perspectives dépravées (Apories)
Sabine Meier / Martine Lacas
Les perspectives dépravées (Depraved Perspectives), whose title is borrowed from art historian Jurgis Baltrusaitis, is the name of a photographic series by artist Sabine Meier. This photographic work is accompanied by a set of constructions depicting implausible spaces, although they appear mathematically coherent in the images.
In each photograph, a detail conflicts with the apparent logic of the space represented and reveals its aberration. During exhibitions, the constructions are shown alongside the photographs as sculptures. Each construction is the material realization of an aberrant geometric hypothesis. We move constantly from concept to its embodiment, following a method that is part empirical experimentation and part mathematical postulate.
The book is presented as a workbook. It includes facsimiles of some of the pages from the notebooks that accompany the artist as she conceives her works. Preparatory drawings, notes and various reflections, reproductions of images and sources of inspiration immerse the reader in the slow creative process required by Sabine Meier to design and prepare her photographic works. The creation of a single image can take several months... Reproductions of the finished works also punctuate this veritable artist's book.
Les Perspectives dépravées (Apories)
30 x 24 cm, 120 pages, approximately 100 color reproductions, hardcover binding
ISBN: 978-2-8431-4071-6
Texts: Martine Lacas
Co-published with Matmut pour les arts
Graphic design: Annelise Cochet / Camping sauvage
ISBN: ISBN : 978-2-8431-4071-6
Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov
Sabine Meier / Martine Lacas
Sabine Meier went to New York with the idea of creating a portrait of Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, the famous character created by the Russian writer Dostoevsky. Armed only with her memories of reading the novel several years earlier, she wandered the streets of New York. It was during these wanderings that she recognized in the face of a passerby the man who would become her Raskolnikov. How did she manage to convince this stranger to embody the image of this fictional character? A long collaboration began between them, and "Portrait of a Man" was born.
This book is structured like a work of fiction, like a "photographic" view of the mind, aiming to create a mental portrait of the protagonist of Crime and Punishment. If we are to speak of a photographic adaptation, it is neither a faithful rendering of the novel's narrative nor its contemporary illustration: the novel is a source from which Sabine Meier has freely drawn the material for her photographs.
Martine Lacas's text takes shape from Sabine Meier's photographs. Not to return to the starting point or, like a meticulous iconographer, to find what from the novel has been translated into each image, but to allow the reader to grasp, within the act of reading, the dynamic of such a process. This text is therefore neither a commentary on the photographs nor an illustration of them.
Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov
16.5 x 23 cm, 136 pages, 60 four-color reproductions, softcover on textured paper with gold foil stamping
Graphic design: Danish Pastry Design
ISBN: 978-2-919507-38-2