Formes et couleurs

Forms and colors is the title of a book published exactly one hundred years ago, in 1921, by the Librairie centrale des beaux-arts. The author, Auguste Thomas, stenciled twenty plates of richly colored decorative motifs. It is this book that inspired the idea of creating an abundant repertoire of images on the theme of decorative arts according to two strict but vast axes: form and color.

The invitation to Valérie du Chéné to work with Anne Jourdain, the person in charge of the old collection, according to implicitly subjective choices, was self-evident: because of her plastic research on color, on the form drawn in contours, and because of the discovery she made of the old collection when she arrived at the isdaT, coming from Paris where she had studied fine arts. He needed to pass on to first-year students the “treasure” contained in these old books and encourage them to come back and open them as picture boxes throughout their years of study. Between the pedagogy and the ancient collection, the enrichment is always mutual.
Like these young students, we are invited to forget our usual screens to satisfy ourselves with a simple visual contact with the book, without taking a picture, without interposed luminous screens, but by the touch of the paper, of the binding, by handling the work. Temporality and space are diluted by the concentration, the suspended time generated by this simple consultation. The gestures are slow, the manipulation and the observation measured; words are exchanged.
The graphic design studio Stereo Buro has joined forces with our editors: Diane Boivin and Silvia Doré have developed an iconological suite of shapes and colors with contrasts and tones that fade and change in gradation as the pages turn.
The images are posed face to face, by association of forms and colors, in all subjectivity, according to the framing, the reasons, the tints, by connivance, by reaction, by similarity, by opposition, by play, by chance, without rules nor constraints.