Dupont vs. Fournier
Cover and back ▲
Interior ▲
Dupont vs Fournier is an artist’s book. It is the seventh collaborative portfolio between writer Andrés Barba and painter Alberto Pina for El cañón de Garibaldi.
Through the clash between Dupont and Fournier—hussar officers in Napoleon’s army whose duel is recorded as the longest in history—Barba and Pina have created a piece that explores unmotivated violence and blind obsession with hatred. It is a profound synthesis where the human and the animal intermingle, blurring the boundaries between civilization and barbarism.
The year of my father’s death and of the translation of The Duel, I discovered something else: that the experience of death is also akin to a fight. An arbitrary fight, in which someone suddenly decides to destroy us for reasons beyond our comprehension. We feel the blow, the impact, but not its meaning. The violence generated by death is all the more burdensome because of how obvious it is that we have always known we are mortal, and so are the people we love; hence the double stupefaction: weeping because the inevitable has happened, and managing the shockwave of meaninglessness that this event projects onto our lives. (“Why was I born if it wasn’t forever?”, lamented the king in Ionesco’s play). Perhaps that is why never more than after death do we feel the need to infuse with coherence what was so often incidental in the person who is gone. We know, of course, that the deceased’s life was full of shadows and that they moved through it in the same dazed and tentative way almost everyone does, but our relationship with reality, rather than distorted, becomes sensitive and hyper-real; we feel that to tell the truth about the dead we need—paradoxically—to lie about certain things.
DUPONT vs. FOURNIER
Text by Andrés Barba, engravings by Alberto Pina
15 numbered copies and 2 artist’s proofs
Each book contains 5 woodcuts on beechwood (210 x 150 mm).
Printed in 3 inks on 290 gsm Fabriano Tiepolo paper (21 x 42 cm).
Box dimensions: 230 x 440 x 25 mm
Layout: Miguel Goñi
€700 (4% VAT not included)