The language of images

 The Catalonian Garden is a unique work, since it represents an original artistic creation of the mixed genre that Butor calls an artist’s book, with the writer entering directly into the field of painting. This is a unique collection of ten books, each containing six handwritten poems, a collage by Michel Butor and six original paintings by Georges Badin, all of which take pleasure in echoing each other… These books are rare, even exceptional, barely published or in very few copies, especially when they are hand-painted or hand-written. « … There’s a remarkable generosity in what he does that makes me breathe and gives me free rein. It’s not so easy for a painter to let a writer write signs on his canvas. » Interview with Musard, Anne-Sophie, “The relationship between painting and poetry”, March 2002. Butor continues: “…This cooperation is a clear way of overcoming my frustration as a returning painter. Writing within a work of art means becoming a painter yourself. The place of words is crucial, changing their weight and meaning.” The words change their meaning in the painting, as they themselves become painted ensembles, interpictorial elements. It’s the opposite of illumination, this time it’s the writer who intervenes on the painted surface of the painting, as Michel Butor explains.

• The Interartistic Phenomenon in the Catalonian garden, in Picturing the language of Images, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, 2013,

ISBN-13 ‎: 978-1443854382

             Picturing the Language of Images – Cambridge Scholars Publishing

• See also:

12 Ранноесенна школа по семиотика,  “Бленуваният рай на Мишел Бютор”, участие с доклад представен на 12тото издание на Международния колоквиум по семиотика в Созопол,  13 септември 2006, http://www.georgesbadin.com/texts/textes-de-vassilena-kolarova

[12 Early Fall School of Semiotics, “The Dreamed paradise of Michel Butor”, Contribution presented at the 12^th edition of the International autumn semiotics conference at Sozopole, September 13th 2006]

• An International, Interdisciplinary Conference on Text and Image, March 29-30, 2007, at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, CT, USA, “The Interartistic phenomenon in the Catalonian garden of Georges Badin and Michel Butor”.

Cover of the artist’s book the Catalonian Garden by Georges Badin and Michel Butor, Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Paris, 2000

“Poetry insists on the spatial arrangement of language; it is therefore in collusion with painting. It makes it sing”, Michel Butor, Interview, March 2002

The Catalonian Garden by Georges Badin and Michel Butor, Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Paris, 2000

The Catalonian Garden by Georges Badin and Michel Butor, Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Paris, 2000

“This voice you have by your side without interrupting it, like carrying effluvia that don’t join, and every glance becomes a sentence or several.” Voices, When Michel Butor and I make books – together. (letter from Georges Badin, 2007) … “The painter prevents the river from disappearing by illuminating the passage of water between the stones with a solid blue, taking countless precautions to achieve the freedom of the poem.”

In painting, the painting can be interartistic in relation to the text (if we observe the painting as a text), but it can also be interpictorial, if the painting and the text recreate a painting and are themselves studied as two paintings. The same case can be seen in literature, where the text, which can be taken as a painting and as a text, enters into an interartistic and interpictural relationship with the painting and the text. In the work of Butor and Badin, however, the two arts come into physical collusion.

The Catalonian Garden by Georges Badin and Michel Butor, Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Paris, 2000