La Main et le Regard. Livre/Louvre

Jean-Philippe Toussaint Published on the occasion of the exhibition Book/Louvre, Louvre Museum (March 8 - June 11, 2012). I would like to evoke the book without going through writing. It is, in a few plastic propositions, a visual tribute to the book ...declares Jean-Philippe Toussaint about the BOOK/LOUVRE exhibition, for which the Louvre Museum gave him free rein. In the exact continuation of this exhibition, The Hand and the Gaze. Book/Louvre is a work that, through the image and not through the written word, intends to pay tribute to the book; apparently paradoxical and yet natural mise en abyme for a writer, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who is also a filmmaker and visual artist. Jean-Philippe Toussaint, about his book The Hand and the Gaze. Book/Louvre: The book is an integral part of the exhibition. I designed it as an autonomous visual creation, a luminous, insolent, melancholic and colorful composition. What interests me is to relate elements that are not necessarily equivalent, a Dürer engraving and a photo of Zidane, Renaissance paintings and readers' hands in the Tokyo metro. I try to create correspondences, both horizontal - the left page in relation to the right page - and vertical - one page in relation to the one that follows or the one that precedes it. There are images from the exhibition at the Louvre, but also images from my films, personal images, intimate images of my own brain captured by the latest medical imaging techniques. In this way of relating all these images, sometimes I illustrate, I complete, and a harmony of meaning or tonality emerges, sometimes I clash, I jostle, I clash, and this creates a dynamism, a draft, a contrast, an imbalance.