Carte blanche to Urucum publishing

February 15 - March 23, 2024

Carte blanche to Urucum publishing

February 15 - March 23, 2024



 

Galerie Ceysson et Bénétière is pleased to grant carte blanche to Urucum publishing. 

This exhibition will feature books with unique works by the following artists :  Pedro Cabrita Reis, Antonio Dias, Ferreira Gullar, Frans Krajcberg, Roberto Magalhaes, Marco Tirelli, Joana Vasconcelos, Claude Viallat and Luiz Zerbini.   

Founded in Brazil in 2014, under the name UQ! Editions by Lucia Bertazzo and Leonel Kaz, they have hand-edited and produced around ten projects by artists such as Leo Battistelli, Antonio Dias, Frans Krajcberg, Wanda Pimentel and Luiz Zerbini. 

In 2017, the publishing house moved to Portugal with the publication of a book containing original paintings on bamboo paper by Pedro Cabrita Reis. Now under the direction of Lucia Bertazzo, the publishing house changed its name to Editions Urucum to continue this fine creative work, in close partnership with the artists.

From then on, the publishing project opened up to artists from different countries, including José Eduardo Agualusa, Marco Tirelli, Joana Vasconcelos and, more recently, Claude Viallat. These book objects have been exhibited in various galleries, fairs and art institutions in Spain, France, Italy, Mozambique and the United Kingdom, and form part of the collections of institutions such as the Getty Center and the Library of Congress (United States), the Reina Sofia National Museum (Spain) and the Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal).                                                                                                                                                                        

The publisher's latest book, produced in collaboration with Ceysson & Bénétière gallery artist Claude Viallat, gave us the opportunity to get to know this fine publishing house better, and inspired us to mount an original exhibition based on this fascinating work. A sort of retrospective of ten years of producing book-objects on the borderline between art publishing and original work. 

Imagine objects that don't decide to be a book or a painting, or even a sculpture. Imagine unique objects that can't be reproduced, that have been made by hand and express a mad desire to jump on walls and become paintings. Objects that want to be looked at like works of art and at the same time handled like books. 

These are the objects of Urucum: hybrids of books with something else - book-drawer, book-window, book-object - each of them seems to reinvent what is ultimately... a book. 

Each publishing project is an abyss, each edition entirely different from the next. To say that they are hand-crafted books would be reductive and would not capture what they really are. Each one has been designed as it is produced, creating one prototype after another; making one, two, ten prints in different colours until a single one is defined. In constant dialogue with the artists, they adapt the work of the publisher to the singular poetics of each artist. 
 




Artists :
Pedro Cabrita Reis
Antonio Dias
Ferreira Gullar
Frans Krajcberg
Roberto Magalhães
Marco Tirelli
Joana Vasconcelos
Claude Viallat
Luiz Zerbini

Visitor Information

Ceysson & Bénétière
21 rue Longue
69001 Lyon

Gallery hours:
Tuesday - Saturday
11am - 6pm
T: +33 4 27 02 55 20