Bal de tête

Bal de tête — A Year of Drawings from the Unconscious

Bal de tête is a wordless artist book by Chloé Poizat, published by Éditions Cornélius. It emerged from a self-imposed constraint: one drawing per day for one year, executed in small-format notebooks. The result is a procession of forms that appear to have surfaced almost automatically — shapes that were waiting, as Poizat herself describes, in the unconscious, for the door to be opened.

The visual world of the book is populated by creatures at the edge of recognition. Children grow from trees where they will be hanged; figures emerge as smoke from chimneys; bodies appear decapitated, mutilated, truncated. A dog with a cabbage for a head, a man with a snail's head, a girl on fire — these apparitions drift at the border of dream and waking, condemned to a permanent, unresolved wandering. They are half-human, half-beast, half-comedy, half-trauma, and they carry with them the residue of ancestral fears and nocturnal creatures that collective memory would prefer to suppress.

The lineage the book inhabits is precise. Odilon Redon's symbolic bestiary, Gourmelin's grotesque figures, Virgil Finlay's obsessive cross-hatched monsters — all are plausible neighbours. The shadow of Lautréamont is never far. Bal de tête belongs to the tradition of surrealist and grotesque image-making in which the unconscious is not a metaphor but a method: automatic in origin, disturbing in arrival, formally controlled in execution. It is part of the broader Artbooks & Artist Publications that Lokator100 carries from publishers working at the edge of illustration and fine art.

Poizat trained at the École des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans and works from Paris. Her press illustrations have appeared in Libération, the New York Times, Le Monde, and XXI; she has produced theatre posters, novel covers, and illustrated editions for both children and adults. Alongside her commissioned work she publishes her own nano-books — Disparition, Culinaire, Neuf Souvenirs d'enfance — in an experimental, self-determined format that sits deliberately apart from the conventions of the artist's book. Her installations include a series of 146 badges, each depicting a different monstrous face. Bal de tête is one of two Poizat titles stocked here; the collaborative work Pièces montées, made with Gianpaolo Pagni, offers a different register of the same restless visual intelligence.

The book is wordless throughout. Its meaning is not withheld — it is simply not verbal. For readers who approach the grotesque as an aesthetic position rather than a provocation, this is a precise and considered object.