Éditions Sylvain Courbois, Lille

Les Éditions Sylvain Courbois presents a collection which celebrates friendship and focuses on two integral multiples that stem from the desire to join together two artists who share a strong bond and a mutual admiration: Michel François and Harold Ancart.

Two or three versions of Harold Ancart’s lithograph; each of them is lit up by a sculpture/lamp designed by Michel François.

On the opposite end, there is a one square meter display introducing an edition of Benjamin Katz, a German photographer who played an important role in art history of the last thirty years of the twentieth century, and whose work provides an insight into the various friendships that were developed between certain artists at that time.

Inside Michel François’ studio, deep within the cracks of sculpturing, functional shapes take form. Thus, to rearrange his new studio, the artist developed, from 2013 to 2017, a series of sculptures that could be used as lamps. Harold Ancart liked right away those items that were impromptu, yet deeply rooted in the artist’s body of work. When I offered Michel to produce one of them, I wanted to celebrate the friendship that binds the two artists together and ask Harold to create a lithograph that would be displayed in the light of this lamp. Reacting with his characteristic enthusiasm and determination, Harold chose the model of the lamp; as for the lithograph, he said: “If Michel is making the lamp, then I’m making the matchstick!”

Several weeks later, I received the photograph of a painting that Harold had just offered to Michel: a single match erected like a skyscraper, whose fame has just started burning.

In line with this painting, Harold Ancard creates the lithograph inside Bruno Robbe’s studio, altering the various print runs so that the 35 lithographs are slightly different from one another.

As for Michel François’ lamps, they are subjected to variations. There are two stages in their fabrication process: first, quick and spontaneous artistry and then a patient finishing stage that uses plaster.

They are the continuation of the Scribble, a series of sculpture the artist started in 2007.

A three-dimensional realization of the simple drawings that one makes when testing their pencil on a piece of paper; the artist possesses an impressive collection of those scribbled papers.

Benjamin Katz’s vast body of work contains around 500,000 photographs. They are sorted out using in a very methodic fashion by the artist himself in approximately a hundred archive boxes. We are developing an ambitious publishing project whose goal is to produce a set of portfolios, each assembling about 50 print runs selected in each box. It will establish a definitive setting for the riveting body of work of this photographer, whose shots of the artists capture an expression that reveals the bond and friendship that binds them to him.