VEVEY, SWITZERLAND Museé Jenisch presents Erik Desmazieres: Imaginary Places - Prints and drawings, on view through September 9, 2007. In the landscape of contemporary prints, Erik Desmazières' prints are remarkable for their unusual iconography, out of our era, capable of fascinating the person who can follow its meanders. Following the recent exhibition on the views of Paris at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the 113 works selected by the Musée Jenisch cover some forty years of creation and focus on the places born from his imagination. Strange towns, exotic explorations, cabinets de curiosités -sort of antrum -filled with artificialia and naturalia and other labyrinthine libraries offer many other detours through the main references of Erik Desmazières' universe

The Print Cabinet of the canton, proud of its thirty prints by Erik Desmazières kept in its collections, has long nourished the thought of presenting to the public this work that brings together technical virtuosity and dream-like vision. The technique is very classical - the author confesses his admiration for Piranesi, John Martin, Monsù Desiderio as well as Callot - but Erik Desmazières' etchings, by the density of their details and the complexity of their architecture, require a slow reading as well as the concentration that the amateur of prints values so much. The printer likes to quote Flaubert: «By looking at something, it ends up becoming interesting ». His visions that at first seem realist soon take on something strange, in keeping with the tradition of vagaries, in which the topographic reality is combined with elements of fantasy, and mark this work with the seal of melancholy.

By combining his own work with those of public and private collections from the USA, France, Belgium and Switzerland, the Cabinet offers an itinerary through these imaginary worlds aiming on the one hand to better know this exceptional artist, on the margin of current currents, and on the other hand to reveal the slow creative process, inherent to the media of print itself. Not only do the works hung in the museum reveal a work made up of strata and sediments, both in the carvings made in the copper and the complicated spatial constructions or in the obsessive recurrence of certain themes. But the film called Le Paris d'Erik by Bertrand Renaudineau and Gérard Emmanuel da Silva follows the artist at work, showing his process from the preparatory sketch in pencil up to the final unveiling of the print by the printer, including the minutely detailed work on the copper plate.