ART ON PAPER Sep-Oct 2000 From Nancy Princenthal's column, Artist's Book Beat

"(...) Laurent Sauerwein has come up with a still more concentrated format for surveying the landscape at large: wordless little photobooklets, ten pages or less, that each describe a single experience or place (Nîmes, Ecoles des Beaux-Arts and Laurent Sauerwein / youcantouch.com, 2000). Most are digitally printed on demand; a recent quartet, though, were offset, among them Tramontane (ff150), which features the crown of a single, sun-bleached tree, shot against a pale, high-summer blue sky; Promenade (ff250) traces a seaside walk toward town, the camera alternately swinging up, to a white-hot, gull-flecked sky, and down to scrubby plants and rocky paths. In Livre (ff200), perspectives shift more widely still, with the spread-open pages of a book of French fables radically cropped and angled, making reading a fairly dizzying procedure. Sauerwein, who has worked in sculpture, film, and criticism, maintains a Web site (youcantouch.com) where some of his books can be seen, while insisting that he remains committed to the touch and time associated with turning paper pages. But what seems to interest him most is the space between the two media, and these wafer-thin publications, each page a camera’s casual click, succeed admirably in mimicking the screen’s lucidity, with surfaces slick and changeable as water."

Art on Paper is a magazine published bi-monthly in New York. Nancy Princenthal regularly contributes to Art On Paper. Subscribe to Art on Paper