Dear Shaded Viewers,
There is a particular kind of woman who spends seventy years making less and less and is mistaken, right up until the end, for someone who hasn’t found her subject yet. Pierrette Bloch found hers early — ink, thread, horsehair, the white of the page treated not as a starting point but rather as the point itself — and then spent a lifetime refusing to complicate it. This is either the most disciplined thing an artist can do or the most intimate. I’ve stopped believing those are different questions.
From September 4 to October 4, Yvon Lambert — the bookshop-gallery on rue des Filles du Calvaire that has always understood a book as a body, not a record of one — is showing Papiers. Livres, estampes, encres & pastels, with a vernissage on the 15th and, that same evening, the presentation of a previously unseen Bloch publication. The show narrows the frame deliberately: not the horsehair sculptures that made her legible to a wider public, but the works on paper and the prints — the part of her practice she treated almost as private correspondence. It’s a woman declining to repeat herself out of something closer to self-respect than ambition.
What Bloch understood, and what fashion keeps relearning at great expense, is that restraint is not the absence of desire — it’s desire with excellent posture. Her line does one thing: it goes forward, loops, refuses to resolve into a shape you could name, and in that refusal, it becomes more intimate than any figuration would allow. She called the sheet of paper a journey rather than a surface. I’d call it a boundary she kept redrawing so she’d have somewhere new to trespass.
The MAMC+ retrospective last year gave her institutional weight; this one, smaller and stranger and closer to the ground, gives her back her privacy, inviting us to a rendez-vous with her closest friend — paper. Her relationship with words began to take shape in the early 1990s through short texts, first scattered across numerous catalogues and later brought together in Discours et circonstances. The exhibition reunites her complete body of writing, including the posthumously published Mémoires d’Antoine Chantin. It also brings with it something previously unseen: Gédéon et Symagré, an unpublished text by Pierrette Bloch, released in a limited edition by Sylvain Courbois. Almost like an extension of the exhibition itself, the text opens onto a quieter, more intimate side of Bloch’s practice. Here, words seem to follow the same logic as her visual work — reduced to what is necessary, precise and restrained, yet never without intensity.
During a conversation with David Quéré, Bloch’s estate executor, about the artist’s transitions and choices of materials throughout her career, I was interested in why it was important to make this exhibition happen now. His reply was: “Because she is deeply missed.”
Pierrette Bloch — Papiers. Livres, estampes, encres & pastels, Yvon Lambert, 14 rue des Filles du Calvaire, 75003 Paris, September 4–October 4, 2026. Opening and book presentation: September 15, 6–8 p.m.
