Since 1989, the Musée du Louvre and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux have been commissioning contemporary artists to create engraved plates for Chalcographie, which has the exclusive right to print any number of proofs.
Very different trends in contemporary art are represented. Geneviève Asse rubs shoulders with Georg Baselitz, Pierre Courtin, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Pat Steir, Jean-Michel Alberola, Robert Morris, Louise Bourgeois, Markus Raetz, Pierre Alechinsky and Agathe May.
Markus Raetz was born in Büren (Switzerland) in 1941. Influenced by Pop Art and optical art, Markus Raetz works on the perception of the eye, shapes and deformations. Some of his drawings are only perceptible when viewed from a specific angle. An experienced engraver, he has specially trained himself for this work on copperplate, reproducing the lines and thicknesses characteristic of seventeenth-century French burin art. The fluid waves here play on three levels. The interplay between light and shadow, and the printing of a single plate in negative and then in positive, give rise to images of water and earth surfaces. They illustrate the Heraclitean philosophy that apparent stability is a composition of change and movement.
