Julien Blaine

“The fable is the relationship between the animal and writing, […] it allows us to understand how the human being works.”

Julien Blaine

In the Fables series, Blaine aims to present pictures that have not yet been created. Therefore, he proposes a painting that is not imagined by the artist but by the viewer. Here, the artist wonders how it is possible nowadays to think of and narrate fables to transmit a moral, suggesting that in fact, this is not possible because the ancestral dimension wherein the fables were born has been lost. The work therefore proposes two paths: in the first the viewer is invited to create an image autonomously from the text, which often consists of puns and word plays, in the second the viewer starts from the painting’s chromatic suggestions to imagine the content of the fable and therefore of the panting.

Christian Poitevin, artistically known as Julien Blaine, is a poet, visual artist, performer, and editor who has dedicated himself to sound poetry, visual poetry, and mail art. He began to be interested in the relationship between word and image in the early 1960s when he created his first magazine, Les Carnets de l’Octéor. During this time, he also made his first performances, such as Reps elephant 306 where he interviewed a circus elephant. From 1975 to 1991 he published Doc(k)s, one of the most long- lived and important magazines on visual poetry. He founded V.A.C. (Ventabren Art Contemporain) and was the initiator of various festivals of sound poetry.