When poetry meets painting and engraving... The Fondation Marc Jurt presented the product of the collaboration between the painter and the poet Michel Butor. What could be more moving than the encounter between a painter and a poet? The result was "Géographie parallèle", a unique and magnificent suite of 50 works that Marc Butor considered to be the pinnacle of his oeuvre. The painter multiplies the interventions and layers, painting, engraving, scratches, glued paper, pen and pencil highlights, while the writer puts down his words.
This work in two voices is exceptional in its scope and inspiration. Words and images mingle without ever merging into a gallery and a script that keep each other in sight and lose sight of each other in a dizzying mirror game. The paintings are written, as the poems are painted. Yet it seems as if they are made of the same flesh or the same paste. Each welcomes the other to lend him his voice, his breath, his material.
Each reveals to the other its secret geography and helps it, in a never-ending dialogue, to penetrate the mysteries of its own mystery.
The performance of a young actor in the reading of Michel Butor's texts moved the whole assembly.
Congratulations to the foundation for this wonderful exhibition!