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TWO LINES TITLED 4.8 / TWO LINES UNTITLED 4.08

Peter Downsbrough

TWO LINES TITLED 4.8 / TWO LINES UNTITLED 4.08
2009

TWO LINES TITLED 4.08 (left image)
6 1/2 x 4 1/8 inches (16.5 x 10.5 cm)
48 pages / Unpaginated / Stitch bound / Softcover
34 plates (grids, drawings, photographs, Two Lines, words)
Offset (duotone)
Publisher: Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels, on the occasion of the exhibition Five Films and Two Books, April 23-May 16, 2009
Printer: not noted (Cultura, Wetteren, Belgium)
Print run: not noted (750)
ISBN: none

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ NUMBER: 83

As with A CALAIS and REGROUP, and REFER – and REFER vol. 2, TWO LINES TITLED 4.08 and TWO LINES UNTITLED 4.08 are companion volumes. Again, the format and number of pages are identical, and the content is strongly related. In addition to the Two Lines, Peter Downsbrough again uses the grid on the full page or part of the page along with words printed at times in mirror image or else printed at different percentages of black, sometimes darker and sometimes lighter. As was done in TWO LINES, THRE SECTIONS (no. 82), which has a similar layout but a few more pages, the images in these two volumes are printed in duotone. Some of the elements overlap at times, as in the earlier book WITH ]IN – PLACE (no. 78).

TWO LINES UNTITLED 4.08 (right image)
6 1/2 x 4 1/8 inches (16.5 x 10.5 cm)
48 pages / Unpaginated / Stitch bound / Softcover
47 plates (grids, drawings, photographs, Two Lines, words)
Offset (duotone)
Publisher: Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels, on the occasion of the exhibition Five Films and Two Books, April 23-May 16, 2009
Printer: not noted (Cultura, Wetteren, Belgium)
Print run: not noted (750)
ISBN: none

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ NUMBER: 84

This book is similar in concept to the above title, but here the grid appears on all pages.

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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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