Made in 2021 at the URDLA print studio in Villeurbanne, these lithographs take up the heart, one of the most worn-out signs in visual culture, and return it to the hand.
Anne-Lise Coste sprayed the motif directly onto the litho stone, so each heart keeps the traces of its making: the soft, blurred edge, the scattered droplets, the slight asymmetry of a single gesture. In red or in black, the heart reads as an emblem and as a stain in equal measure, somewhere between love letter, graffiti and wound. In two of the sheets, the heart meets a word. In
Liberation Coeur (rouge), it sits over the hand-sprayed LIBÉRATION, which breaks apart around it. In
Poème Coeur (noir), a black heart lands in the middle of POÈME, sprayed in blue, and the word and the sign become a single statement. The personal and the political, the lyrical and the declarative, share the same surface. The lithographs are published in very small editions, each hand-signed and numbered.