SILK
Soie - Alessandro Baricco & Rebecca Dautremer - 19 x 24 cm - 208 pages - hard cover - €16- October 2012
Alessandro Baricco: “I have always refused for Silk to be illustrated until the name Dautremer was suggested to me… What a delight to see a story, that once was mine, told again by a person of her talent.”
Silk is a story. It begins with a man who travels the world and ends up by a silent lake. The man is called Joncour. The lake, nobody knows. It could be described as a love story. But if it was only that, it would not be worth telling.
Illustrating Silk is giving Joncour a face, but not the mysterious stranger, out there, in Japan. Nor the lake. It is imagining a kilometre-long silkworm, a cigarette that travels the world, Flaubert and an elephant, a tattoo on the chest of a Japanese warrior, a catalogue of objects spared by a fire, a few pretty blue flowers and a bottom, too. It is putting into pictures lost fidelity, silent love, desire and pain. Images everywhere telling a beautiful story once more, in their own way.