Medium Rare

Jean-Marie Picard is a rather unique figure in contemporary French printmaking: he is at once a wood engraver, printer, publisher, and creator of artist’s books. His career is particularly interesting because it lies at the intersection of contemporary art, bibliophilia, and a very ancient printing tradition.

>Jean-Marie Picard, wood engraver

Picard trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, where he was introduced to engraving by François Dezeuze. In the early 1990s, he worked with the Jacomet studio, which led him to collaborate with and produce prints for artists such as Gérard Garouste, Eduardo Arroyo, Olivier Debré, and Moebius.

His specialty is relief woodcut: the engraver carves into the block and preserves the areas that will receive the ink. It is therefore a process in which the drawing is literally constructed by subtraction.

What is particularly remarkable about Picard’s work is the relationship between the engraver’s hand and another artist’s drawing. He may receive an image or a drawing and have to translate it into the extremely specific language of wood engraving. He engraves primarily on pear wood, with a precision that can take dozens of hours for a small block.

>Medium Rare Editions

In founding Medium Rare Editions, his approach involves, in particular, reviving a rather unique tradition: the graphic or literary novel transposed into woodcut.

It is therefore not simply a publishing house that “prints engravings.” There is a genuine exploration of the relationship between:

the writer and his or her portrait;

the text and the image;

literature and woodcut;

the printed object and the original work.

The choice of figures depicted is also revealing. Medium Rare Editions has produced woodcuts associated with writers such as Camus, Cendrars, Hemingway, Philip K. Dick, Edgar Allan Poe, Marguerite Duras, Toni Morrison, Amélie Nothomb, Patricia Highsmith, and others. A 2022 series, for example, includes woodcuts measuring 167 × 120 mm, printed on BFK Rives vellum, in editions of 50 copies, signed and numbered by Picard.

And Medium Rare isn’t limited to literary portraits: Picard has also worked with artists such as Jean-Michel Alberola, Willem, Charles Burns, Paquito Bolino, and Pat Andrea.

It would be reductive to view him simply as a “technician” who engraves other people’s drawings.

Rather, his career demonstrates a desire to reestablish woodcut as a contemporary medium, even though it could easily be associated with historical illustration or traditional bibliophilia.

There is a rather fruitful paradox in his work: a medieval/ancient technique serving contemporary artists and writers.