Nano Lithography

Foreword ¹

“An image is a pure creation of spirit.” (Pierre Reverdy)

Today, in a world of eternal representation, we are the observers of the theater of the grand image for as far as the eye can see, a theater which incessantly unfolds in the marvelous recording box that is our brain. Though we see them, the touch and even the substance of illustrations sometimes escape us completely, so much so that we can almost not differentiate between representative illusion and the physical reality of beings and things. Yet, the representation of the world in our eyes is not the same as the one that we want to transpose, to put into images. There, the reality of that which is visible is captured by our brains, which makes copies which are sometimes faithful, sometimes untrue. To produce these images we have, since the dawn of mankind, resorted to sometimes extremely complex alchemies, where invention has struggled with various materials, as a result of which we have been able to leave behind our illustrated drawings, the prints of our lives and of our societies.

For some 32,000 years man has not stopped etching, doodling, drawing, copying, painting, reproducing – for nothing, for eternity – producing millions of infinite writings and images which are the imperishable memory of his genius. How did he do it, with which materials, on what, and why? The alchemy of representation, in its great complexity, deserves to be slowed down, so that we can try to understand, for example, how today's images ...