Pleasure
2025
published by Vibrational Semantics
82 pages
138x190mm
edition of 100
A distorted bootleg version of Roland Barthes’ classic meditation on different modes of writing and reading, The Pleasure of the Text. In the original text, Barthes sets out an erotics of reading in textual experience. He contends pleasurable texts, those familiar and coherent texts that comfort the reader, with blissful texts, those that disrupt the reader by breaking down literary conventions, pushing the boundaries between ambiguity and experiment.
In my reworking, this proposition is taken a step further to the formal properties of the text. The typography itself is morphed into a visual erotic body of voluptuous form, spilling across the frame of the page, disrupting the reading experience and creating new visual and textual compositions. Somewhere between text and image, reading and drawing, the eye is drawn to certain propositions, whereas others disappear into obscurity.
Published by Vibrational Semantics.
Supported by Jan van Eyck Academie.