ISBN 978 - 2 - 9540208 - 8 - 4: Claire Morel | SOLO SHOW

For Claire Morel, writing 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 animates with its presence and abscence.

Since 2005, Claire Morel designs and publishes books, conceiving printing, and shaping them, she dilates and contracts the book, folding and unfolding it. Feeling the book's space is about removing it from its perception of linearity, uniformity and the codes that have progessively been established in writing and its support. Claire Morel takes her readers by surprise, questioning their reading habits in order to make them aware that a book is a work which, as every works and every object, 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 personal library. 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 she owns in one volume, ISBN 978-2-9540208-8-4 - she brings them all.

From this book and her book collection, Claire Morel tears writing off the page, ink off the paper. She reorganizes and spreads out the surface of the pages composing her collection onto the gallery floor, while gathering the ink used to print ISBN 978-2-95402208-8-4 in a single spot . 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. Deconstructed, the book no longer exists but as a mere idea.