rêverie revers

Name: rêverie revers - Sylvie Eyberg
Brand: Keijiban
Price: 75.000000 EUR
Availability: InStock

Sylvie Eyberg

2025

Offset printed leporello

15.7 x 7.8 cm (folded) / 15.7 x 131.4 cm (unfolded)

Edition of 60 copies, numbered and stamp-signed, 3 artist's proofs, 3 publisher’s proofs, and 10 hors-commerce copies

A deluxe edition, comprising the first ten copies (1/60 - 10/60) plus the APs and PPs, is accompanied by an additional print entitled un chemin

Price

€75.00

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The edition

This edition takes as its point of departure an old tourist booklet devoted to the city of Paestum—an object the artist has cherished since childhood. From it, rêverie revers borrows both its framework and its form: a leporello unfolding as a long sequence of color images on one side and black-and-white captions on the other.

As is often the case in the artist’s work, the sources of inspiration are both multiple and subterranean, surfacing in the visible and the readable realm only through fragments, allusions, and incomplete traces. One can discern remnants of antiquity, southern and northern landscapes, and excerpts from books. Some are first-hand images; others are photographs of photographs or of films, revealing their grains and pixels in close-ups that verge on abstraction. All gradations of blue and green unfold, punctuated by the ochre of stone and the white of pages.

The texts that appear on the reverse of these images, rather than fixing their meaning like simple captions, instead deepen their mystery. With neither side subordinated to the other, the two faces echo one another, inviting a play of back-and-forths, rebounds, and returns. As its title suggests, the work is above all about reverie—those wanderings of thought through the labyrinth of time that only the act of reading can awaken.

The artist

Sylvie Eyberg was born in 1963. She currently lives in Brussels (Belgium).

Since the late 1980s, Sylvie Eyberg has worked on the interplay of images and words. She is mostly known for her precise and enigmatic combinations of black and white or monochromatic pictures with fragments of texts. Both elements usually come from magazines, books, and other printed material, and are then carefully selected and reframed, sometimes enlarged.

In some way related to the tradition of photomontage, these works express a strong sense of composition. The black and white tonality and the scarcity of depicted elements also contribute to a sense of austerity. But at the same time, the viewers/readers will quickly find themselves absorbed into the very texture of images and words. Magnetized by the muffled indetermination that permeates the works, they try to make sense of the suspended gestures and accidental aphorisms, the dreamlike figures and the poetic stuttering.

In addition to these works made using a wide range of printing techniques (photography, silkscreen, heliogravure, inkjet, and offset, among others), the artist has produced a series of films that extend and displace her interest into the relation of images to literature. These films are also an affectionate homage to cinema, to its rich history and its ability to fire up our imagination.

Let us also mention that Sylvie Eyberg generously conceived the text-work that serves as Keijiban’s logo—a carefully carved paragraph from a text dedicated to Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

At the invitation of curator Thierry de Duve, she represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 2003, together with Valérie Mannaerts.

Sylvie Eyberg is represented by Galerie Greta Meert in Brussels.

The exhibition