When literature leaves no stone unturned

About the recent residency of Alice Guittard, creator of still lifes in marble inlay.

Is there still room for poets in this world? Because Ghérasim Luca thought there wasn't, he ended his life in 1994, at the age of 80, by throwing himself into the Seine... But Alice Guittard, born in Nice in 1986, imbued with all the poetic density of her studies in geography and archaeology, met "Héros-limite" in 2005. One of her famous vertigo poems. "Woman neck, cuckoo, woman cut bread, like a loaf of bread, in two, cut in two with a, she lived in peace, in two, cut in two with a saw, so so with a fine saw..." As a worthy representative of contemporary art, she embarks on a post-mortem collaboration with Ghérasim Luca. She also falls in love with Camus' writing. She mixes publishing, sculpture, performance, drawing, photography... "preferring imaginary solutions to tangible results, and the crossroads to well-trodden paths", she writes.

And then, in 2016, she met a grave engraver. On Alice's way, the photographed faces start to marry the marble. One thinks of the portraits of the Fayum. Unless hands are inlaid on the stone when she discovers this marquetry technique in Istanbul in 2018, because her light-sensitive chemistry has been turned away at the borders. Alice Guitter's marble slabs, sliced under high pressure with unequalled finesse, can now also represent vases, flowers or keys... She has just come out of an artist's residency in Lisbon, and Richard Leydier devotes his "introducing" to her in the new issue of Art Press, the magazine for contemporary artists. Enough to motivate a search on art gallery websites and to make you want to buy contemporary art.