The typographical work exhibited on this website dates to around 1990 and was created using the publishing software Xpress. Designed to create and edit layouts, Xpress, which was still a novelty at the time (it was first released in 1987), would eventually become the go-to tool for professional graphic designers worldwide until the early 2000s, after which Indesign, its only competitor, would gradually take over.

 

In 1990, Denis Malartre has just abandoned his practice as a photographer to become a graphic designer. Of the five “Books” he produced and that we are presenting here, almost nothing is left except for prints of mediocre quality—done with an office printer and glued on cardstock magazine templates—that we digitalized. To our immense regret, we were unable to find the original computer files. Nonetheless, we decided to show these “Books” in this imperfect form because we consider it essential to his work.

 

Let us stress to begin with that to create them, he used XPress software like no one else used it at the time and, to our knowledge, like no one has ever used it since: from a perspective that is neither typographic—strictly speaking—nor graphic, but pictorial, and of which the affinity with his “objectal” photographs appears quite clearly.

 

By playing with the digital distortion of the characters—mostly narrowing them—, by reducing the letter spacing, by decreasing their size and squeezing the line spacing in a uniquely radical way, so radical as to infuriate purist typographers—or should we say puritan—and that ends up expelling, page after page, the very notion of text and typography, when in fact they are both, paradoxically, the basic material of what is shown; by not caring less, in opposition to graphic designers, about that which is being “communicated” and focusing only on what is present; by choosing abstraction over any sort of readability—the latter being used as background, as one abstract element among others, let us say conceptually; by multiplying the columns of text to the point of rendering them almost imperceptible (see pages 28-29), or by discrediting the concept of  a “block of text”—characterized by the margins that surround it on the page—, having the lines go all the way from one side of the open book to another without stopping at the fold (see pages 18-19); by using for all these “Books” only one font (and what’s more in one single weight), Futura, a “minimal” font, one of the prevailing fonts at the time as were Franklin Gothic and Helvetica (we find this last mentioned, as if winking at us, in a picture taken earlier in New York—see chapter New York, photo number 13); by focusing only on the value of the “typographical grays”, an old notion which goes back to lead-based printing but is redefined here by using the extreme capabilities of digitalization (superimposing characters, narrowing, etc.); by showing, in these gray spaces, how repeated copy & pastes of the same text create rhythms on the printed surface, produce new matter, new forms; by focusing not on text but on textures—which end up creating moiré-effects as do overlapping patterns (see pages 42-43)—, even though we can never forget that we are looking at text; finally by questioning our relation to the printed surfaces rather than immediately search-for-the-meaning like we are accustomed to do when looking at typographical objects, as would do Pavlov’s dogs that would have learnt to read and would go after a message, Denis Malartre extends, in his new field of work (graphic design), the research he started with his “objectal” photos four years earlier.

 

Abstraction, minimalism, frame, geometrization, composition, relations between surfaces, grays, materials, spatial illusions, surprises, destabilization... It’s all there—and it’s delightful to  lose yourself in it.

 

From this perspective, Denis Malartre’s typographical research, that he showed, as far as we know, to only one person, takes on all its importance, all its significance, and belongs to the most intimate part of his work.

 

Antonin Lazare