You Could at Least Pretend to Like Yellow

You Could at Least Pretend to Like Yellow (2020) is the eighth book by Belgian collage artist Katrien De Blauwer, and the first in her Libraryman series to organize an entire monograph around a single color rather than a single subject.

De Blauwer built the book around a chance discovery: a companion volume to Vilgot Sjöman's 1967 film I Am Curious (Yellow), found in an antique shop before she had seen the film itself &mdash "pretending to like yellow" while she waited. The 40-page hardcover reproduces 40 works in color, each printed at its actual individual size and paired, unusually, with the verso of the cut photograph as well as its front, giving equal weight to the residue of the source image and the collage made from it. Libraryman produced it as a linen-thread-bound, color offset hardcover with a yellow headband and printed endpapers, in an edition of 450 with 250 signed copies.

The book extends what Libraryman calls De Blauwer's practice of "cut" rather than collage &mdash recovering discarded photographs and giving them a second, private narrative rather than fusing them into new composite scenes. Since her first collage books in the early 1990s, De Blauwer has shown at Paris Photo and Art Brussels and is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Gallery Fifty One, and Rosegallery Yellow followed Why I Hate Cars and When I Was a Boy as the third of her Libraryman monographs built around memory by accumulation rather than subtraction.