Cyan Years

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.Somewhere between index, archive and artist's book, Cyan Years holds the tension between the slippery distortions of Simonet, who sometimes lets all trace of the photographic wash away entirely, and the precise gestures of mechanics and expertise that his works both interrupt and uplift. These gestures are tribute to the artistry and labour of those who deliver, discreetly, the printed matter of our quotidian: cheese labels, town hall flyers, holiday brochures, and this book. At once personal and experimental, Cyan Years marks a specific period within Simonet's practice, the years in which the factory served as both tool and subject, and a farewell to an industrial family heritage whose future now hangs in the balance, part of a slow, symptomatic decline of offset printing across Europe.Like a Möbius strip, Cyan Years presents itself as an object with looping endings: images of the factory are further reworked and adapted within its own walls, only for these eventual artworks to be digitised, proofed and reproduced by the very offset processes they depict, with the book printed entirely inside the factory and subject to on-press interventions directly by the artist and publisher.