Bertrand Fleuret | News Blog

01.2013 | THE CLIFFS IN AFTERIMAGE |

The Cliffs reviewed by Adam Bell in Afterimage.

"It begins with a dream. Berlin. September 3, 2006.

Bertrand Fleuret’s daring new book, The Cliffs, flirts with the most dangerous of artistic clichés—the dream. Writing for The New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon recently opined, “I hate dreams . . . I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash . . . The recounting of a dream is—ought to be—a source of embarrassment to the dreamer, sitting there naked in fading tatters of Jungian couture.” What saves Fleuret’s foray into such treacherous terrain is his self-conscious embrace of the artistic device and its limitations. Modest in size and scope, the book does not proclaim any grand intensions or meaning, but operates within its own parameters. Either unafraid or unaware of such dangers, Fleuret presents us with his own dream—a dream of ascent, exploration, and hellish confusion. Cliffs loom in the distance and chaos reigns."

12.2012 | Landmasses and Railways, in Discipline in Disorder |

A review of Landmasses and Railways in French:

"Alors regardons les choses en face, les seuls livres que nous voulons ouvrir aujourd’hui, à l'heure du bilan terminal, sont des livres qui inventent un autre monde, des livres de fuite totale.
Landmasses & Railways, par exemple. Dire qu’il a été photographié à Berlin durant des mois n’est même pas une information. Ce pourrait être un laboratoire ou une station orbitale, ou une cité expérimentale sur Mars (le garçon ne cite pas pour rien Sun Ra comme source d’inspiration principale, à coté de Solaris, Sans Soleil et Soudain l'été dernier). On y retrouverait tous les détails de notre monde (des scarabées aux montres en passant par les tapis persans) mais dans un désordre total, si bien que l’univers contenu ici est rendue sous la forme d’une énigme épaisse qu’il est difficile de décoder. Quand la reconnaissance ne joue plus, c’est tout le langage qui est dissout, et avec lui la vue : Qu’est-ce que voir quand on ne reconnaît pas ?
... "

Read the full article here.

12.2012 | Landmasses and Railways, in the NYT Magazine |

In an article about Claire Cottrell's new online store: Book Stand

“Founded by two of my favorite artists, Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford, J&L Books is one of the best small nonprofit publishing houses on the planet. This title takes a darker look at the natural world in a mysterious, voyeuristic, semicreepy but austerely beautiful way. In the artists’ words, ‘It seems to be the record of a trip. You left the countryside and entered a city. Lost in the layers of construction and decay, you eventually found yourself in an overgrown garden.’ Magical.”

10.2012 | The cliffs, in The Last Magazine |

Bertrand Fleuret’s work deals with memory. His earlier Landmasses and Railways (also published by J&L in a larger format than The Cliffs) compiled a selection of seemingly loosely-related black-and-white images that created the impression of a dimly remembered journey. The Cliffs, a small, handsome volume of sixty-eight pages, recreates an unusually vivid dream Fleuret experienced. The cover presents a textual account of Fleuret’s dream, originally written in a notebook upon waking. Inside, each page depicts a single image against a stark black background, illustrating a line or two of text. Most of the images are Fleuret’s own original photographs, though some were (intriguingly) sourced from vintage ads and dusty copies of National Geographic. The Cliffs concludes with several pages of reproductions of Fleuret’s sketches and notes on the dream. A great book for the bedside table.