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 Edited by Charta / Federico Luger
Text by Giorgio Verzotti, Francois Michaud
128 pages
Texts in English, Italian, French.
28 x 28 cm
Price: 39 euros.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0saG86yqcnw&feature=related
The painting cycle dedicated to Jackson Pollock, and documented in this publication, stems from a bibliographic repertoire: the Une vie, éléments et documents section, the annotated and illustrated biography of the great American painter, as it appeared in the Jackson Pollock catalogue of the Musée national d’art moderne of Paris in 1982.
In his artist’s book, Gabriele Di Matteo places over seventy illustrations from that original catalogue under a reproduction process: the photos that portray Pollock in the various moments of his life have been “translated” into paintings and transformed into portraits in a delicate act that stops just short of copying. Instead, all the documents (letters, typewritten pages, invitations, and so forth), some rewritten by hand, have been rephotographed and enlarged. Extraneous to this process are Pollock’s paintings, and thus the exhibition views—of halls or exposition spaces that hosted his celebrated drippings or other works—only present blank canvases.
In stripping the artist of the image he has left behind, what remains, on the one hand, are his paintings and all that cannot be compared with any present dynamic, and on the other, his life and the impossibility it faced.(Charta, 2008) |
