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André Piguet
SELECTED WATERMARKS 1282 – 1600
André Piguet (b.1986) is influenced by an ever expanding field of interests; perhaps most simply filed under “WORLD”. He has a long held interest in making books.
For nearly two decades in the late 19th Century, the Swiss filigranologist, Charles-Moïse Briquet systematically visited 235 paper archives and manuscript collections, as well as libraries for about a thousand printed items. He examined 30,840 volumes, as well as 1,432 documents in unbound form, from which he made a total of 44,000 tracings and recorded 65,000 references to the same. This Herculean feat of historical scholarship culminated in the publication of Briquet’s four volume encyclopedia of European paper watermarks, LES FILIGRANES (1907).
A watermark is a small image that appears in paper when held up to light source. In a method dating back to the 12th Century, these designs were bent out of thin strands of copper wire and sewn into a wire paper mould, supported by a wooden frame.
Ranging from the chaos, ferocity and social disruption of the 13th Century to the rise of humanism and clarity of the high renaissance, these images offer a small window into a Europe caught between ancient and modern; of a world where the mundane and mystic still co-existed.
SELECTED WATERMARKS 1282 – 1600 is a condensed 470 page bootleg photocopy edit of Briquet's 1907 publication. Eschewing any formal design or sequencing and stripping the source material to its bare formal elements, Piguet’s book is both an exercise in graphic deconstruction and an exploration into the possibilities and constraints of the photocopier.
