This artist's book is characteristic of Jean-Michel Wicker's work with typography and graphic design. It features a series of graphic works, a “tree of life” produced in collaboration with Marlie Mul, a text by Harry Burke, and a recipe for Alsatian plum pie by Charlotte Wicker. The publication's inserts reproduce collages and paintings by Wicker.
Wicker injects into all of his work certain letters (e, b and B) like viral recurrent elements, thus recreating an alphabet that multiplies and diffracts in both the exhibition space and books. [...] Playing with multiple typographic combinations and layouts that spill over several pages, Wicker's works, his books and more specifically our edition of #picturebook1, disseminate comments on and questions about recurring themes like identity, sexuality, autonomy, freedom, resistance, and transgression in the larger and richer field of culture and anti-culture. While the different assemblages of letters offer multiple typographic études like musical scales, the repetitive system is put to the test, creating nearly abstract geometrical pages. The artist's #picturebook1 likewise features sketches and freer drawings, and lays out images, details, and signs that appear from one page to the next, a surprising variation on the page layout. And like inserts or pages printed outside the confines of a book, Wicker's paintings and collages also develop in series. They may change into full-blown structures or grow in thickness, frequently being covered in papier-mâché as if smothered in paste, and become objects. The printed works are mixed in with temporary mechanical sculptures in installations which often include furniture that is made by hand from humble, so-called “poor” materials.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “BBiblioteca ffanafffantastica”, Centre d'édition contemporaine, Geneva, from March 24, to May 6, 2017.
Since the 1990s, the work of French artist Jean-Michel Wicker (born 1970 in Riedisheim, lives and works in Berlin) has focused on all forms of production, including publishing, typography, performance, and gardening. Wicker is the founder of the publishing houses Le edizioni della luna, Nice, Le edizioni della china, Berlin, and Ballabella papers, Berlin.
