L’Antichambre de la nature
*L’Antichambre de la nature* is an early and important book in the dialogue between Alain Jouffroy’s poetic writing and Wifredo Lam’s visionary visual language. It appeared in 1966 as the first volume of the *Paroles peintes* series, a collection that treated the meeting between poet and artist as an autonomous book form. Lam illustrated the work with nine original etchings, including an initial, giving the volume the intensity of a graphic ensemble rather than that of a merely illustrated text. Jouffroy’s title suggests a threshold space: not nature itself, but its antechamber, where forms, forces and metamorphoses prepare themselves. Lam’s hybrid universe, with its vegetal, animal and human resonances, answers this idea with exceptional precision. This copy is one of the 50 numbered examples on Rives B.F.K., signed by both author and artist. As the first volume of *Paroles peintes*, it also has a programmatic importance for a whole line of French artist’s books of the 1960s.
Quantity
Jouffroy, Alain
Lam, Wifredo
L’Antichambre de la nature
1966 | Paris | Lazar-Vernet / Albert Loeb
A signed Rives B.F.K. copy of the first *Paroles peintes* book, with nine original etchings by Wifredo Lam.
*L’Antichambre de la nature* is an early and important book in the dialogue between Alain Jouffroy’s poetic writing and Wifredo Lam’s visionary visual language. It appeared in 1966 as the first volume of the *Paroles peintes* series, a collection that treated the meeting between poet and artist as an autonomous book form. Lam illustrated the work with nine original etchings, including an initial, giving the volume the intensity of a graphic ensemble rather than that of a merely illustrated text. Jouffroy’s title suggests a threshold space: not nature itself, but its antechamber, where forms, forces and metamorphoses prepare themselves. Lam’s hybrid universe, with its vegetal, animal and human resonances, answers this idea with exceptional precision. This copy is one of the 50 numbered examples on Rives B.F.K., signed by both author and artist. As the first volume of *Paroles peintes*, it also has a programmatic importance for a whole line of French artist’s books of the 1960s.
€3,500
Condition Report:
In-Depth Study
References & Bibliography
Format
Petit in-Folio
Edition Particulars
One of 50 numbered copies on Rives B.F.K., with 9 original etchings by Wifredo Lam, including an initial, signed by Alain Jouffroy and Wifredo Lam.
Print Run
85
Paper
Rives B.F.K.
Inscription
Signed by the Author,Signed by the Illustrator
Product DETAIL
The book consists of a poetic text by Alain Jouffroy, surrounded and traversed by nine original etchings by Wifredo Lam. It offers no conventional plot with characters or action; its centre is a lyrical and visual exploration of nature as a field of forces. Jouffroy approaches nature not descriptively or pastorally, but as a zone of tension, metamorphosis and inner experience. The title places the reader in an antechamber, a preliminary space where visible forms are not yet fully fixed and where the organic appears almost ritually. Lam’s etchings give that space bodies, signs and hybrid apparitions, as if nature itself were producing masks and symbols. The alternation of text and image makes the reading slow and ceremonial: each page becomes a passage between language and vision. The work is therefore less a story than an intense exchange between poetry, printmaking and modern myth.
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