Three Star Books

American artist Matt Mullican delivers an epic overview of forty years of his own symbologies in the artist’s book edition he has created for Three Star Books. It is a masterpiece on several levels. First, in a continuation of other productions by the Parisian press, Mullican deftly shows how the thing itself, the artwork pointing to itself, functions as its own best history. In dozens of colored plates rubbed by hand with a special graphite crayon custom made for the artist in the United States, over wooden and paper matrixes created by the Mullican studio, a catalogue of the principal signs in Mullican’s prolific private software language have been mapped out. A visionary in the employment of computer imaging techniques since the 1970s, Mullican has developed pictures that look like circuit breakers, mapping programs, virtual worlds, and equivocations between language, signs, and pictures. Mullican catalogues his astonishing research into images of arresting essentialism. Executed in a finite range of colors (red, blue, yellow, and green), on American paper made by the French Paper Company, the format and feel is like that of a newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal. Mullican’s new grammar conjures up everything from ancient alphabets and Etch-A-Sketch to pictograms that might decode our own time. Ranging in shape from simple squares, triangles, and circles, to dizzying jumbles of interlocking forms, from works that seem to run parallel to the paper plane, to others that point to extra-terrestrial worlds, Mullican’s cosmology is no less than a vision of a universe both utterly hermetic and private, as well as a clue to the nature of thinking itself. 
In elegant counterpoint to a recent Three Star book produced with Italian artist Maurizio Catalan, Mullican too offers an art historical overview and catalogue, of his own work. Mullican’s artworks, however, are each represented text-less, and full bleed on the picture page, as separate and new works, in addition to being reproductions. Their status as new originals is underscored by their reproduction in hand-made form. Playing not with texts and the forms of art history, but with the ability of reproductions to be the material of art, Mullican creates new possibilties for a way to describe art and write art history. The images represent works produced in a wide range of galleries and museums, or for other publishers and editions’ workshops, and in media ranging from concrete, glass, and fabric to many other materials.
Each page sequence, carefully rubbed by hand by assistants from the Three Star Books and Mullican Studio, is both a copy and an original, both a drawing and a print, both a book and a picture. The matrixes were carved in New York and the “printing”, or rubbing, has been done in Paris. The final selection of twenty-eight out illustrations are placed in a box constructed of cardboard and covered with an orange cotton material, a color not found in the book, and decorated with an original drawing by the artist. Some of the pages are double-page folios, others fold out into multiple-panel frames.
Whether seen in light of similar efforts by 16th century mapmakers, or as the latest in virtual imaging techniques, this cosmology by Matt Mullican is a remarkable technical, geometric, and artistic achievement that testifies to the artist’s ability to be both utterly subjective and particular, while offering universal truths.

Le Prix Jean Lurçat 2011 a été décerné le 28 octobre 2011 à 88 Maps, de Matt Mullican aux Éditions Three Star Books. 
Ouvrage exceptionnel à bien des aspects, 88 Maps regroupe 36 planches proposant une vue d’ensemble de plus de 40 ans de recherches artistiques de l’artiste américain Matt Mullican. Grâce à un système de classification propre établi dans cet ouvrage à travers une série limitée de couleurs représentatives – rouge, bleu, jaune et vert –, il élabore un véritable modèle de cosmologie toute personnelle, usant de pictogrammes. L’artiste imagine des villes et des contes universels qui simulent les phénomènes de la nature ou les mystères de l’être humain.
Le Prix Jean Lurçat est un prix de bibliophilie créé en 2005 à l’initiative de Madame Simone Lurçat, à la mémoire de son époux, membre de la section de peinture de l’Académie des beaux-arts, qui a pratiqué l’art de la bibliophilie. Il est doté d’un montant de 7.000 € et récompense chaque année un peintre ou un graveur ayant illustré un ouvrage original récent de bibliophilie. Il s’agit du seul Grand Prix de bibliophilie en France.