A limited-edition book of poems on night and rupture, with plates by Jean Dubuffet
A Limited-Edition Poetry Book
Voici qu’ici is a collection of poems in French by Jacques Berne, published by Fata Morgana in 1979. The original edition is an octavo volume of 64 pages — roughly 14 by 22 centimetres — issued in paper covers. It was printed in a run of five hundred copies: thirty numbered copies on Ingres d’Arches paper, and the remainder on tinted vélin.
Poems of Night, Disappearance and Rupture
The poems gathered here are associated with three recurring motifs: night, disappearance, and déchirure — a French word for tearing, rending, or rupture. Each points away from presence toward darkness, fading, and breakage, and together they establish the collection’s emotional register. The title itself turns on ici, the French word for “here,” which is already embedded in voici, “here is.” That doubled insistence on the here-and-now sits in deliberate tension with poems given over to vanishing and to being torn apart.
A Berne–Dubuffet Collaboration
The book pairs Berne’s poems with two full-page plates by Jean Dubuffet, printed apart from the text. Berne, a French writer and essayist, was a long-standing friend and correspondent of Dubuffet, and Voici qu’ici belongs to a group of books in which the painter’s images accompany his writing — among them Il y a, Poèmes, and Le cœur en fête.
Jacques Berne was born in Le Havre on 2 August 1924 and died there on 26 August 2007. In 2012 the MuMa held an exhibition titled Le poète et le voltigeur. Jacques Berne et Jean Dubuffet, 40 ans d’amitié, dedicated to their relationship.
Dubuffet, Painter and Theorist of Art Brut
Jean Dubuffet was born on 31 July 1901 in Le Havre and died on 12 May 1985 in Paris’s 6th arrondissement. He was a French painter, sculptor, and plasticien, and the first theorist of an art style he named “art brut”: productions of marginal people or mental patients — paintings, sculptures, calligraphies — by which he acknowledged having been largely inspired.
Further Bibliographic Entries
Berne’s bibliography also includes Le Flux même : et autres poèmes (Paris, Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Près, coll. « Collection blanche », 1976; ISBN 2-243-00244-2) and Le cœur au repos, with illustrations by Jacques Soisson (Paris, M. Bon, [1980]). Il y a was published at [Montpellier] by Fata Morgana in 1979; Poèmes in Paris by [Jean Dubuffet] in 1980; and Le cœur en fête in Gourdon by D. Bedou, in the collection « Deleatur », no 16, 1984 (ISSN 0751-4905). An auction note also describes Le Flux même as an in-8° paperback with a cover illustrated by Dubuffet; the copy offered had a damaged cover. An auction description of Le cœur en fête adds that it was printed at Bort les Orgues and issued in unbound sheets with illustrated covers, in a run of ten numbered copies plus one hors-commerce; that copy, whose spine was sunned and slightly soiled, contained five sérigraphies by Dubuffet, a signed and numbered colour lithograph by Dubuffet, an envoi by Dubuffet, and Dubuffet’s pencil copy of a poem by Henri Michaux.
Copy-Specific Records
A dealer’s listing describes one Ingres d’Arches copy as uncut, numbered 26, with the spine of the cover very slightly sunned. An auction record for another Arches copy identifies it as number 16 and describes it in a framed black morocco binding by C et JP. Miguet, with a smooth spine, the cover preserved, and a slipcase.
