Cyan Years
- Publisher
- Loose Joints
- Year
- 2026
- ISBN
- 978-1-912719-81-5
- Specifications
- Section-sewn OTA-bound softcover with multiple paper stocks
19 × 26 cm
176 pages
118 colour plates
Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon, Jean-Vincent Simonet
Texts by James Langdon, Salomé Burstein
Designed by Jean-Vincent Simonet and Loose Joints Studio
Production and photography collapse in an experimental metaobject that takes Simonet's four-generation offset printing legacy as subject, method and site of production. French artist Jean-Vincent Simonet works at the bleeding edge of photography, painting and mixed media in an alchemical practice of reworking, overprinting and creating slippages within print processes. Simonet's unique methods were refined over the last decade inside the four walls of his own family's print works in Bourgoin-Jallieu, a fourth-generation enterprise to which the artist stands at the end of that lineage. Cyan Years recalls a memory of his father coming home from the factory with cyan ink staining his skin blue. In anticipation of the factory changing hands, Simonet has undertaken an exhaustive inventory of its innards, using the site itself as subject in the breaks between production schedules, evenings, weekends and holidays. Cyan Years is characterised by a sequence that swirls and congeals like wet ink, mixing press interventions, tests and finished works, snapshot images that reference out towards Simonet's wider practice, the factory and family archive, and more. Holding these different registers together is the core series, Heirloom , which regurgitates the mass of materials, objects and information that constantly run through a printing factory into original artworks that bear the traces of their origin.