Jérôme Pierrat

This book explores the artistic nature of tattooing and celebrates its living, creative, changing essence. Alongside the omniscience of tattoing throughout the world for thousands of years, presented through rare artifacts, the book pays tribute to the pioneers of the modern era, those responsible for its great transformation into the mainstream. Tattooing has become one of the most dynamic artistic currents of our era and is ever-evolving, despite the great revolutions the art has undergone. This book looks to its foremost representatives, the tattoo artists themselves, the guardians of the temple. With this in mind, two types of contemporary workshop creations have been produced. The first one presents thirteen silicone models, thirteen ‘extracts’ of the body, prints modelled from actual people, used by tattoo artists in the exercise of their art, machine worked or using traditional tools, depending on their daily practice. In search of a mise en abyme, blank canvases were offered to other artists, in the classic application known as ‘body suit’. The artists featuring in the book are world recognized. All active continents are represented: Europe, America, Asia and Oceania. All practitioners are respected by their peers for their contribution to the art. Finally there is a series of photos presenting the two most recent currents in modern tattooing, a locker room of aesthetic graphics that firmly root tattooing in the third millennium.

Never before has the tattoo been spread across thevarious strata of society with such enthusiasm. In just a few decades thispractice dating from the Neolithic period has become a globalized phenomenon. Now retrace the history of the tattoo in this look at its role in fashion,societal standing, and aesthetics.

In the years 1945-1963, Jean Dubuffet set about documenting his collection of Art Brut. He had the pieces photographed by recognised photographers on the Paris art scene, including Henry Bonhotal and Emile Savitry. But he also had pieces photographed that were not in his own collection, including works that interested him because, like Art Brut, they were marginal to the official art world. These notably include works of popular and naïve art, children's drawings, tattoos, graffiti photographed by Brassaï and graphic works from the Solomon Islands. Dubuffet arranged these photographs of artworks by over a hundred artists - including Gaston Chaissac, Aloïse Corbaz, Joseph Crépin, Auguste Forestier, Somuk and Adolf Wölfli as well as anonymous artists - in extraordinary sequences contained in 14 albums (755 pages in total). These have been preserved since 1976 in the archives of the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne. Classified by artist, the images document paintings, drawings, embroideries, sculptures and collages. In assembling this image bank in the years 1945-1963, Dubuffet set up a dialogue between highly diverse forms of expression of his period, all of which flowered away from the more familiar terrains of art history and culture. This facsimile edition of the Photographic Albums of Jean Dubuffet is combined with a booklet of essays by specialists: preface by Sarah Lombardi, Director of the Collection de l'Art Brut and essays by Baptiste Brun, Nicolas Garnier, Karoline Lewandowska, Jean-Hubert Martin, Jérôme Pierrat and Michel Thévoz. Text in English and French.