Describing is maybe the most difficult thing, but that's what you have to do, at least at the start. What can you see? On the one hand books - cal them notebooks if you like — full of collages, quotations, words and images. And on the other, panels of accumulated layers of stretched paper, some of them quite big, bearing line drawings with (sometimes numerous) little windows cut into them and words appearing in the windows. And the first thing you feel faced with these books and panels is & sense of the unknown: not only because of the novelty of what you're seeing — which bears no relation to anything you've ever seen before - but also, and mainly, because of the sensation of beholding a work in progress, an ink and paper project which is growing and which you can't imagine being brought to an end. The pages of the books, the layers of the panels, the books as an archive and the panels as a projection or as pages released or emancipated, all combine to form a complex configuration in which writing, reading and looking are offered becalmed, as if at the core of some pure beginning. What we are confronted with is both collection (the rationale of the book, of the heaping-up of pages) and distribution (the rationale of the panel as part of the classical system of frontal exposure to the eye). Except that collection and distribution intersect, the successive layers and emergent words of the panel also forming a kind of archive while the books too, under glass, offer themselves to our gaze.

But in addition to this intersection, which is a matter of method, there is another, which is a matter of meaning and has to do with the very advent of meaning: whother the issue is words (these strange columns they emerge from like survivors) or images (these outlines of pale or assertive figures forming a choreography of perfectly immobile lines on the panels), the question being put, it seems to me — and it ean only be re-put, endlessiy — is that of our earliest method of approach, that of language, of the system of signs through which we have learnt to pick up the signals sent out by the world. There exist an origin and a figurative reality of writing, bearing the mark, distinctive in each case, of hieroglyphs and ideograms. Nonetheless words remember this origin, from which the alphabetical signs have become detached: words emit images, or what the thinkers of the Middle Ages called copies — in every designation there is a tracing. Conversely the outlines of the forms - and such would be the effect of the very etching of the hieroglyph; but doubtless too, here, is the dizzying quality of the figure - designate, or name. Its this crisscrossing of the systems of name and outline, i.e. of writing and drawing, that Christelle Franc has decided to explore. But has she actually decided? I think not, in fact; it isn't the right term. Rather this has come to her as an inescapable task: instead of simply reading, cutting language up into integrated units of meaning; instead of simply looking, sampling and tracing outlines. And working, within those two (simultaneous) options, from a range of materials of which the dictionary is the paradigm. The dictionary: in other words the paradise of the list and the definition, of storage and association and also, indubitably, of a kind of roving thought process that uses definitions and their abruptness like Japanese stepping stones, as a means of traversing the shifing mass of the thinkable.

For the dictionary definition, and more broadly the document, are for Christelle Franc no more than points of departure, notches or triggering points: as if, in a way, the definition hasn't really been accepted: as if there were the strictest parallel between its deconstruction (testified to by each word saved or returned) and the act of racing and outining. The outcome is a dual movement of disquiet and trust, detachment and proximity, just as when you gropingly touch something; l'm thinking here, of course, of the game of blind man's buff, which could thus be taken to some extont as an allegory of what Christelle Franc has set out to do in the forest of signs. This is work as a kind of (re)commencement, which is to say like childhood or as in childhood: not rejecting the arbitrariness of signs, but seeking to trace out of their constellations and formations à clear, non-arbitrary line imbued with the joy of an existence. Not an already-present existence, not a dwelling-place, but something much lighter, something 80 to speak in the process of coming or coming back, working from a proven trace that could as easily be a cultural monument, like the Tower of Babel or Vermeer's Music Lesson as a quivering on the surface of water, a ricochet, or maybe ivy twining round a tree.
Ultimately what is being explored in this way is the mystery of the infinity of meaning, and its near neighbour, that of the possibiity of infinite expansion for each notch, even though each initially presented as finite: definition and out line, which are just such notches, or such encodings, and which, as such, are perfect representations of what presents as finite, are only, at the same time, outcrops; and its as such, this time, that breaking through, and brushing against us, they broaden infinitely our field of experience. In drawing language and writing the outline — painters in ancient Egypt were called copiers of outlines - Christelle Franc works patiently, a little like an embroiderer, at cleaning and honing the tool of our approach: with what she makes, and her embroidering, one has the impression of running one's finger along the very stitching of meaning. She calls up this tactiity, which underpins the visible and the legible, on the skin of the paper, in a series of operations at once decisive and discret out of which arise, spectrally, an image which seems fragile only because it is in equilibrium between emergence and effacement. An equilibrium on which hinges the rightness of her work.