A small book was designed to coincide with the exhibition Cénotaphes by Milan Jespers at the Huberty & Breyne gallery in Brussels. It explores the fundamental principles of Milan’s work: montage and the use of found images. By zooming in and using black and white, the book creates confusion between what the artist has drawn and the images he has found.

In his practice, Milan Jespers borrow aspects of early photography such as the highly static pose, the sense of solemnity, and the standard approach to centering and technical blurring. He applies them to his work while simultaneously integrating contemporary elements. By associating and interpreting imagery in this way, he recreates something akin to the archives of a late-19th-century naturalist: a deliberately loose narrative inventory of images that sheds a different light on recent Western history, the way it represents bodies, its social and aesthetic conventions, its predatory policies, its relationship to Antiquity and to nature. Typography: Helvetica.