Porto Alegre, Brazil 2005

Unique hand-made book conceived by Javier Quintanilla to commemorate fellow artist Jean-Marie Lewigue and to be presented and exhibited at the exhibition “Jogo de Dados” (Game of Dice), Casa de Cultura Màrio Quintana, Porto Alegre, Brazil, after which it was given to Lewigue’s widow.
Collaborative work: each of the seven artists was invited to contribute four pages on 300gm hand-made paper 60 x 35cm and was given complete freedom as to style, medium and content. Rea Stavropoulos’s four pages are concerned with issues of life, death, the struggle of the artist for independence and ideas of transcendence as discussed in Rilke’s Duino Elegies and through the figure of the Angel. They include hand-painted images using watercolour, crayon, pencil and ink and hand-written texts. Each artist worked separately, in Barcelona, Madrid, Florence and Porto Alegre and the pages were then sent to Javier Quintanilla who assembled the book. Rea Stavropoulos’s four pages form the final part of the book.