Erik DESMAZIERES (né 1948)

Chaos, 1989. Etching in black on paper. Titled, signed, dated and numbered. Wear, bending and soiling. For more than fifty years, Erik Desmazières has been developing an atypical work, solely centered on engraving (and more particularly the etching technique), combining dreamlike visions and real virtuosity. At the end of the 1970s, following an exhibition organized by the Michèle Broutta gallery, the writer and filmmaker Michel Random launched the idea of a "visionary movement", bringing together artists attached to the technical mastery of classical engravers such as Albrecht Dürer and Piranesi. Visionary, the art of Erik Desmazières is unquestionably so because, as Alberto Manguel affirms, "the rooms, the workshops, the libraries that he draws, as well as the cities that contain them, overflow towards a space external to the page and a time external to that which is implicit in their representation". Erik Desmazières draws, moreover, from a vast literary and artistic corpus which, combined with an unlimited imagination, makes his engravings works with multiple meanings, true enigmas with keys. It is up to us, the spectators, to find them.