Cahier d’Alchimie est une oeuvre réalisée lors du confinement imposé par le gouvernement au printemps 2020. D’une page à l’autre, des motifs apparaissent et se transforment pour former un O. Ces symboles se répètent et se prolongent tel un anneau de Moébius dessinant dans leur répétition un infini. Chaque page de ce cahier est un tableau unique, recto verso, et contient en elles une carte et une recette. Ce livre est une architecture alchimique, une ligne temporelle que l’on parcourt en tournant minutieusement les pages colorées, un ensemble de voyages ou de chemins dans divers des paysages.

Lettre parue dans le catalogue de l’exposition Crystal Clear au Pera Muséum d’Istanbul, commissariat Elena Sorokina

Greetings dear Elena,
On the fabric pages of this book, symbols are drawn, forms are composed in rituals or choreographies of a body in movement around a painting. Its format is defined in relation to a future space.
From one page to another, motifs appear and transform themselves to form another circular shape. Symbols repeat and extend from one page to another, like a Moebius strip, drawing an infinity in their repetition.!All the pages are connected by this pattern.
They were also linked to each other during the production process, by the transmutation that occurred over the course of the ceremony of colour. This happens through the precise mixing of elements such as fire and earth, from which the ochres are extracted, and appears in tools such as the pot or the oven (the athanor), and results from the alchemical manufacturing processes (distillation, cooking, alchemical digestion, infusion, sublimation).
Each page of this notebook is a unique painting, double-sided, reversible; each page is a map and a recipe. Many other details will certainly appear, especially through the use of mottled sheets and their embroidery, which will add elements of interpretation, letters, shapes and their own stories. Other secret layers of mystery might again become motifs!
In the museum, I imagine the pages of the notebook dissociating and splitting in space. They can fold back on themselves to show only one side of their contents, revealing only part of their mysteries. I would like the spectator to pass through this painting, walk through it, feeling the painting physically, architecturally, making paintings hang in the exhibition space as if one (the painting) and the other (the architecture) were supporting each other.
The dye colouring the fibre it is not a surface covering it; it is a transformation of the material. Passing through the painting allows its two sides to be seen, to look at its two faces.
I would like to make a connection between architecture and the book. We read books, turn the pages, we go backwards, we skip paragraphs, we travel a timeline like a path in the woods, the edge of a lake, a walk in the city. It is the movement not of the body but of the mind.
Let’s talk about it again.

Best wishes and see you soon

– Adrien Vescovi