Edition of the Centre d’Art Contemporain for the Pamela Rosenkranz exhibition, March 2010. Pamela Rosenkraz’s use of skin coloured painting on her sculptures is here used to emboss a limited edition. The skin of her hand seems to have melted on the paper. The result seems to contradict the Latin inscription that it attempts to hide.

The Latin quote is by the satirical poet Juvenal. It has also been used as the acronym of a sports brand. It has a positive meaning for the sport brand yet originally it has a negative tone: “You should pray for a sound mind in a sound body”. The mechanism of advertisement is here re-enacted by the sculpture “Firm Being”, a bottle filled with water that creates an odd feeling of revulsion.

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski ’s work depicts an imaginary world filled with narrative elements, details, emotions and obsessions. The canvases are packed with patterns and have a disorienting, hallucinatory quality. The artist’s draws his inspiration from several elements – from abstract geometric art to Street Art, from Guston to Jérome Bosch or R. Crumb. His work is a sort of human bestiary, each emotion is transformed into a specific form: animals, plants, minerals or space. To simply describe his work as a spontaneous chaos is to ignore the artist’s approach. There is in the impression of anarchy of his canvases a conception of the world meaningful to our contemporary thinking on culture.

Using the image of the skeleton – a recurrent theme in the artist’s work – this serigraphy produced at the Atelier C. Humbert-Droz is idiosyncratic for it has no color and Ziolkowksi’s work is usually very colorful. In a circular or spirale like motion the skeleton splits into two through an axial symmetry and hides a second motif at the center of the work.

Adrien Missika’s work is a constant exploration of intermediate spaces, between fiction and reality. He draws from sources such as artificial settings (or decoration ?) and comic strips, fantasy films and postcards. Extensive traveller, passionate about architecture and archaeology, Adrien Missika combines the images of his trips to those he produces in his studio from models made out of poor materials. He also often works with basic lighting. Playing with the viewer’s expectations and assumptions, the artists questions our relation to the world and its representations.

For this edition the artist uses a specific technique and depicts an insular landscape at twilight photographed in a studio with a chamber camera on a analogue negative (4 x 5 inches) and then printed on paper by rotogravure.

In 1828 in Nicéphore Nièpce’s studio photography emerged as a photogravure process. The rotogravure has retained in all its developments the characteristic of an art print: copper, ink, paper. The plate is made photosensitive with bichromated gelatine; it receives the images through exposure to light and is then etched with ferric chloride (just like aquatints). The etched plate is covered in ink and then wiped by hand in order to retain all the features from the more intense to the more subtle.

This process invented by Nicéphore Nièpce was improved by Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor and W.H. Fox Talbot in the first half of the 19th century. Conceived by Karl Klietsch in 1878 this technique of multiple reproduction allows richer nuances than paper development. As Pietro Sarto argues, with rotogravure one can work in “three dimensions”: material, volume and type of ink. Because of all these possibilities, it became the favourite technique of Edward Steichen and the photographers associated with Camera Work.

L’Atelier de Saint-Prex explores since 1968 different forms of etching. The collective of artists – with at its center Pietro Sarto, Valentine Schopfer and Michel Duplain – has among other things produced rotogravures of Balthasar Burkhard, Paul Strand or Edward Steichen.

Philippe Decrauzat’s work stems from the rich legacy of abstraction. On the one hand his approach incorporates the utopian forms of the Russian constructivism, the psychological distortions of op art and the sleek geometries of minimal art. On the other hand the artist has also assimilated ideas of American artists such as Ross Bleckner who recycled during the 1970 and 1980s “historic” abstraction by getting rid of its initial goals. However Decrauzat claims a critical distance towards these influences and a desire to revive what he describes as the permeability of abstraction. He maintains that the history of abstraction has constantly offered evidence of connections between the arts, and goes on to explain that: “The history of forms I am fascinated by intersects with graphic design, film, architecture, music and even literature.”

For his solo show at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Philippe Decrauzat has produced a limited edition inspired by the three dimensional typography on the disc sleeve of “The Faust Tapes” (1973) by the band Faust. Interested in the perception of images by the viewer, the artist used computer programming and design (produced par Jürg Lehni) to enhance its effect.

Shaw’s paintings reveal a fascination for the notion of “Englishness”. The mythologies of English popular culture – his drawings of sadly famous figures such as Peter Sutcliff or the old charm magazines spread around his studio – inform his work. In broader terms his work also depicts aspect of modern Europe.

The artist’s works are based on photographs of working-class suburbs, often taken by the artist himself, a member of his family, or published in local magazines. Shaw covers his images of city halls, rows of garages, damaged parks or rundown playgrounds, with Humbrol enamel on wood, a meticulous process that produces seductive, shiny and detailed images. The images convey an assumed nostalgia and a heavy- both irresistible and disturbing- atmosphere. At times his work pays tribute to Kitchen Sink cinema – British social Realism pf the 1950s and 1960s – in a contemporary and depoliticized version.

This edition created by George Shaw for his solo exhibition at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (his first show outside the UK) stand as unique in the production of the artist nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011. The photograph has a mysterious quality and seems to evoke a fleeting moment.