This project is titled B.A.T, for bon à tirer. The term used in printmaking to designate the validated proof, the one that authorizes the print run. This is the hinge moment between process and work.

Before the HEAD, I trained in engraving and printed images. Looking back on my work, I realized I had been caught up again by engraving: the trace, the gesture, the print.

In this installation, it's my tools that I chose, because it's through them that I express myself. These transitory materials that pass through projects, hands, histories are the ones that interest me.

An engraving plate belongs to a cycle: inking, wiping, printing, repeated until a defined number is reached. Once reached, it is scored through. That's the end of its history, returned to its place as matter.
It's this moment at the end of the process that interests me here.
In this installation, we find ourselves just after inking. The tarlatan still heavy with ink, the plates freshly stacked, the lights dimming. A suspended time between the end of a process and the beginning of a recycling cycle.

Rather than scoring them through, I recover them, they become raw material for my project. I don't score the plate, I cut it, I hammer it. Mixed in with mine are plates by artists unknown to me; a dialogue takes place.
Also mixed with them, the tarlatan. This fabric that keeps within it the accumulation of the ink it cleans. This link that gives rhythm to printing, I want to keep it.

This alteration, I wanted it gentle. Some will say that hitting plates with a hammer isn't exactly what you'd call gentle. The plates shift into their new forms without destroying what they contain. The plate becomes unprintable not only through its division, but through its volume. Like a crumpled sheet of paper, I try to recreate its folds. The gesture becomes instinctive. I stop thinking. 20, 40, 120, 200.

Tanizaki writes that certain things are not made to be taken in at a glance in a brightly lit place, but to be guessed at in a diffuse glow that, at moments, reveals one detail or another.

The shadows become visible, some real, others painted.
This contemplation, this project is an ode to it.
From the term komorebi, I retain the idea of suspension. From the term mushin, this state in which gesture precedes thought.

In this world that only moves fast, the piece remains suspended: neither tool, nor memory, but artwork.