Why I Hate Cars

Why I Hate Cars (2019) follows Katrien De Blauwer's When I Was a Boy with a darker, more painterly turn: the Belgian artist begins layering paint and crayon directly over her cut photographic fragments, adding a second register of mark-making to a practice she still calls "photography without a camera."

The 72-page hardcover gathers 64 color plates built from collected magazine and newspaper imagery &mdash car interiors, rear windows, half-visible passengers &mdash overpainted in flat bands of red and black that block as much as they reveal. An excerpt from the artist's notebooks runs through the volume, and the book accompanied De Blauwer's 2019 Paris exhibition "Love me Tender" at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire. Libraryman printed it in an edition of 1,000, offset and linen thread bound with a red headband and tipped-in cover images, alongside a 50-copy special edition with a hand-drawn signed print.

De Blauwer (b. 1969, Ronse) works by cutting rather than combining, treating the edge of the photograph as the meaningful gesture rather than the picture inside it. Why I Hate Cars sits at the midpoint of her ongoing Libraryman series, between the quieter When I Was a Boy and the more chromatic You Could at Least Pretend to Like Yellow, from a period in which her collages moved from art-fair presentations at Paris Photo and Art Brussels into gallery solo shows at Les Filles du Calvaire and Gallery Fifty One.