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BUT THEN

Peter Downsbrough

BUT THEN
2012

11 11/16 x 8 1/4 inches (29.7 x 21 cm)
32 pages / Unpaginated / Staple bound / Softcover
37 plates (drawings, film stills, photographs, squares, Two Lines, words)
Offset (black-and-white)
Text: Denis Gielen (French)
Publisher: Musée des Arts Contemporains du Grand-Hornu, Hornu (Belgium), on the occasion of the exhibition Le Miroir et les Chemins. Peter Downsbrough—Philippe Durand—Jacqueline Mesmaeker, July 8–October 14, 2012 /curated by Denis Gielen
Printer: not mentioned (Impresor Ariane,
Brussels (Belgium))
Print run: not noted (500)
ISBN: 978-2-930368-53-5

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ NUMBER: 95

On the occasion of this three-person exhibition, each artist was given the possibility to do a catalogue, but Peter Downsbrough chose to make another book. The three volumes, each with the same width, but with a slightly different height, are presented together in a sleeve. The catalogues by the two other artists and the sleeve were designed by a graphic designer. Next to the sparse page designs with the typical visual elements (drawings, film stills, photographs, squares, Two Lines, words), Downsbrough’s book contains, at the very end an illustrated list of the sixteen photographs included in the exhibition which were shot between 1979 and 2011 in places such as Antwerp, Barcelona, Boston, Brussels, Cork, Kent, Munich, Las Vegas, New York, or San Francisco. The epilogue by Denis Gielen, in French, on the back cover, is an elaboration of a text fragment previously published in UNTITLED 5.11, and says: “More than space, more than places (which are only parts of it) it is advisable to speak about territories in regard to Peter Downsbrough’s pieces; singularly complex and maximalist territories in the sense that they are offered as many parcours and readings as possible along words, axes and black areas by which they are signaled and organized.”

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Peter Downsbrough developed a strongly reduced visual vocabulary, which he used to investigate the given space in a very personal and precise way. His materials consists of letters and lines. He used adhesive letters, forming conjunctions, prepositions, verbs and/or nouns and applies them to the walls, floors and/or ceilings. Lines, for which he used cloth tape, emphasize certain architectural elements. Metal pipes, in the space and sometimes on the wall, accentuate the space. Areas defined by lines or painted black sometimes play a role, and, with the lines and the words reveal the architecture of interior or exterior spaces.

This rigorous treatment of the space continues in Peter Downsbrough’s books, maquettes, photographs, videos or prints. They all reveal an extreme coherence, which some situate in the minimal and conceptual art movements. In the course of time, the spatial interventions with the parallel vertical pipes or dowels have been complemented with words, lines and planes. Conjunctions such as AS, IF, BUT, FROM, MAAR, OP, EN, ET, OU, MAIS… have a double function: they work as iconographic signs which underline and reveal the space, and they offer the viewer the possibility to go, in his/her mind, from one thought to the other. For a conjunction is a word that can’t be declined or conjugated; it establishes a connection between sentences or parts of sentences.

Peter Downsbrough: With the word, one takes part in a dialogue, a discourse on its precise meaning. The word for me is an object. It has both a precise and a vague meaning. It is a universe one is confronted with. But there is no obligatory way of reading.

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