Dominique De Beir (b.1964 F) seeks the depth of the surface, wanting to hollow it out, and chooses materials that are simultaneously firm and soft. She treats the paper as a kind of skin that bears the traces of what it used to be and is ready to receive other traces that will make it look different. She always attacks her materials on the reverse, so that the final form only becomes apparent once they are turned over.

Through a series of manipulations, such as cutting, piercing and sanding, she makes traces and streams of colour appear until the surface is almost completely worn away. Her goal is to make the thickness tangible and help the viewer realise that there is a back surface to which they usually have no access. Sometimes she takes the perforations to the limits of what the material can handle. She plays with an inherent ambiguity between building and destroying, opacity and transparency, durability and fragility.

For more than twenty years, De Beir has been exploring the possibilities of paper through its reverse side. This artist’s book, entitled Dos à Dos, brings together a selection of drawings reproduced in four-colour printing on a scale of 1:1 and chosen for the plastic power of their reverse sides. What happens on the back side of the paper is fundamental: that is where the forms arise and where the precarious balance between gesture and matter is formed. In a process that is the opposite of how one normally discovers a drawing, the backs are always reproduced first, while the fronts of the drawings — which usually constitute the work itself — appear on the reverse sides.