Boîte Noire

A very special presentation edition of Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side) / Duchamp With (and Against) Lacan.

This strictly limited edition of 68+1 features a fine photogravure created for the occasion by Cerith Wyn Evans, the first time the artist has worked in this medium. It has been printed by Paupers Press in London using the traditional hand-pulled method. The signed and numbered photogravure sits atop the book in a bespoke presentation box featuring foil block debossed lettering that spells out a cryptic formula extracted from the book.

Cerith Wyn Evans’s beautifully fine-toned image captures an instant of modest resplendency and luminous encryption. An ensemble of glass objects and mirrored surfaces on a mantelpiece produce a dazzling refracted dance of overlapping and intersecting planes of light around a set of photographic portraits documenting an obscure episode in Welsh history.

This unique edition is the fruit of a longstanding complicity between an artist and an author who share a deep immersion in the history of the avant-garde and a delight in wordplay, citation, reference, and untimely conjunctions. The token of a friendship, of a continuing dialogue haunted by the eternally revenant duo Marcel and Rrose…and nourished by Wyn Evans’s ‘queering of the art of the future anterior’, as Alliez writes in his 2020 text ‘Cerith, Even, “So to Speak”: Portrait of the Artist in Neon’.