Initiated by the artist Louis Verret during the spring 2020 lockdown, aussi: is a project combining aquarelle paintings and poetry. The artist first chose books that were dear to him, that accompanied his travels, wanderings, encounters, and discussions with friends… He then painted them in watercolour, each on a different monochrome background, and accompanied each of these images with a text recounting his memories linked to that book. These texts are not simple descriptions or summaries of the books but personal memories of the artist, who anchors his readings in his memory thanks to an intimate temporality, which only he knows and shares with us in this work. Every aquarelle is associated with a poem, his memory, linked to the previous one by a hyphen: “aussi:” (“also:”).
Since the beginning of 2021, excerpts from the corpus have been presented in the solo shows Pizza Hut Saturday night (Sunday morning, too) and Without freedom at the Karl Marx Studio, in the group exhibitions Narrations of the ordinary, Borderline at the Pavillon Vendôme in Clichy, L’écume des songes, DDessin 21.
The artist contacted the Baldinger•Vu-Huu studio to design a book containing each of the 125 watercolours and their poems. They were inspired by the artist’s poems which they reinterpreted. We chose BVH Anto Rounded to compose this book. Typographically, “aussi:” is found throughout the book, introducing most of the paragraphs.
