The red thread

François du Plessis' book objects are irresistible. They attract the eye with their beauty, their well-placed harmonies and disharmonies, their precision craftsmanship and, crucially, their mystery. Their obvious pleasure is accompanied by irritation and provocation from the second glance at the latest - the indispensable ingredients for real beauty.

For the material from which the objects are made is the book. The book in all its types and variations. From the simple paperback from the railway station bookshop to the gold-edged hymn book to the illustrated book on design classics, everything is included. François du Plessis usually buys his working material directly from publishers or from modern antiquarian bookshops. Occasionally, he also uses books from a very specific context for his objects as part of a commission, for example from an estate or from a very specific author or publisher. By his own admission, books interest him exclusively as material, as objects with certain characteristics, structures and colours. Can that be? Can a book be mere matter?

Or does the artist deliberately leave us alone with his works and the nagging question of whether it is permissible to use books as raw material?

Books are a cultural asset, even in the Internet age. If we throw away a technically outdated (i.e. no more than three years old) digital reading device without much hesitation, the necessary disposal of worn-out, uninteresting or embarrassing books presents us with problems. Well-made books are extremely durable objects. People don't like to throw books away. Because even the dullest book stands for a centuries-long tradition of the Occident in which the knowledge of the time was stored and passed on in books.

In addition to this reflection on the symbolic significance of books, there is another aspect: François du Plessis uses everyday objects in his art. With his works, he encourages us to think about our relationship to things themselves. What about our relationship to things, our respect for them? Does this not dwindle in times when we no longer know how something was made, what effort and expense it took to produce our object? Can products whose life cycle is limited by the producer to a season or a few years evoke any emotional attachment in us at all? Things store time - we are emotionally attached to the heirloom that our grandmother used to wear or that our father used to sit on and read the newspaper. Which things that are important to us today are capable of storing time? On reflection, aren't the things that are really important to us also the things that can store time? Aren't books, and only in their printed form, one of our favourite ways of storing time?


François du Plessis never poses these questions superficially and yet they are the background against which his work unfolds. Long before the first book object, the artist collected books without pursuing a specific purpose with them. As a painter, he spent a long time searching for the expression that suited him.


The oldest work in our exhibition is from 1994; it is a painted canvas combined with found objects to form a collage. Eight years later, François du Plessis used books as the basis for his paintings for the first time. The step from painter to sculptor, who understands the books as bodies in space and assembles them into independent three-dimensional objects, seems obvious in retrospect and yet is the result of years of persistent searching. The artist is constantly developing new techniques with which he explores the material properties of his material and repeatedly elicits different, unexpected forms from it. François du Plessis has been working with coloured book cuts for around four years, giving colour a decisive role in his work. In a way, he is also returning to his beginnings as a painter, even if he no longer needs a brush.

As always, I refer you to our catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition and offers a retrospective view of François du Plessis' work for the first time, while also paying due tribute to his current works.

Enjoy and thank you for your attention!

Dr Kathrin Reeckmann, Hamburg, 29.1.2015