Michel Mouffe – Alphabet

Michel Mouffe – Alphabet is the artist's first comprehensive monograph. Conceived as the sequence of letters in the alphabet, this book gives an insight into Michel Mouffe’s body of work through a series of writings and conversations he shared with independent curator Joel Benzakin.

What happens on the hidden side of the canvas? Does the stretcher have a hidden meaning?

Above all, it’s a presence that could be considered the subject (in the traditional sense) of the painting, the element of drawing in the painting.

Initially, I made the stretchers myself. In doing so, a certain consciousness of the materiality of the object painting appeared: a canvas and a frame — themselves supported by a cross in the centre that stiffens the whole. With these first stretchers, it became clear to me that this wooden cross could help me create the motif of my painting.

From the very start, I took into account a certain number of specific peculiarities of painting, because painting was the domain I wanted to explore — though at the time the dominant view was that painting was close to death or dead already.

- excerpt from book Michel Mouffe – Alphabet