Jack Pierson: It's Not Dark Yet (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac)

An elegant gallery catalogue in black textured wraps stamped in gold Art Deco capitals, It's Not Dark Yet documents Jack Pierson's summer 2010 exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, an elegiac meditation on beauty, memory and loss carried almost entirely in drawing.

Published by the gallery to accompany Pierson's fifth solo show at its Paris Marais space (6 July – 6 September 2010), the 40-page volume reproduces the exhibition's nine ink drawings of Antinous (the drowned lover the Emperor Hadrian deified and memorialized across the ancient world) alongside large-format drawings of the silent-film star Pola Negri, pencil renderings of earlier word-pieces such as Glory and My sin, and the letter-sculpture Golden Years. An essay by Zoe Stillpass reads the show as Pierson at 'the edge of night, where memories, like nearly faded stars, still glisten.' The cover carries no title at all, only the artist's and gallery's names in gold foil on black.

Pierson (b. 1960, Plymouth, Massachusetts) emerged from the Boston School alongside Nan Goldin, David Armstrong and Mark Morrisroe, and moves across photography, drawing, installation and his signature found-letter word sculptures his work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim. This slim Ropac catalogue sits with the collection's other Pierson volumes, including the Photology monograph Jack Pierson and The Hungry Years.