Caves in the Sky by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, illus. Oliver Bak, trans. Alberte Harboe Westergaard

CASSIUS&Co. is proud to offer its first artist’s book, a new translation of the poetry of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1907 - 1943) by Alberte Harboe Westergaard, illustrated by Oliver Bak. Published in a limited run of 100 handmade copies, risograph-printed in London by Earthbound Press in 2023, each signed and numbered by the artist.

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was a visionary French poet of the early 20th century, and co-founder of the artistic circle known as Le Grand Jeu, which was at first associated with the Surrealists but ultimately was excommunicated by André Breton. One of the group’s central practices involved the use of drugs to ‘derange the senses’, which first prompted Gilbert-Lecomte’s form-expanding, hallucinogenic poetry, but ultimately led to the morphine and opium addiction that occupied the last ten years of his life and the abandonment of his work. He died at the age of 32 from an infection caused by using a dirty needle, and the collection of verse ‘Caves en Plein Ciel’ was compiled from papers found in his possession posthumously, mostly written when he was 18 years old. Together they comprise an extraordinary body of work that finds both new language and poetic form for exploring emptiness and death, the cosmic spirituality of the unconscious self, and the terror and temptation of the abyss.

Discovering the work of Gilbert-Lecomte by chance in a small rare book shop in Paris, the drawings and paintings that make up the exhibition at CASSIUS&Co. Oliver Bak: Caves in the Sky, took this collection as their starting point. The drawings reproduced here, risograph-printed to give them their own unique quality, have the weird, sensuous, perfumed atmosphere of dreams on the border of death, with their eyeless sphinxes looming out the dark, their human-headed leopards luxuriating at crucifixions (or are they beatitudes?), and their all-over patterns of heady, languorous flowers. Each image here is like its own cave in the sky: a puncture and a refuge on the banks of the abyss, a window onto the void.

Harboe Westergaard’s new translation, presented alongside the original French, sets Gilbert-Lecomte’s razor-like images into a sharp, atmospheric English that gives these toxic and intoxicating works, written almost exactly a century ago, new life in the present day.

Preferred edition numbers can be made available upon request.