I met Pierre Buraglio for the first time at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (the Fine Arts School of Paris) in May 1968. At that time, the red flag flew over the school and the Atelier Populaire was in full swing. We printed serigraphed posters with rudi-mentary materials. The screens were prepared directly with adhesive paste or Drawing Gum, then clamped to ordinary tables with door hinges. We printed on paper cut beforehand from newspaper end rolls that were unfit for the printing press. Once they were printed, the sheets of paper were hung to dry on a cord with clothespins. Every night, volunteers came to help us cut paper, print and hang the posters to dry.

The workshop was highly prolific, print-ing several posters at the same time.

Before being printed, the projects were voted during the General Assemblies. Access was free; anyone could come and take part. That’s where I best remember Pierre. At the time, he was pro-China and never failed to remind us whether or not the project was in line with President Mao’s vision.

These General Assemblies were quite bois-terous. Most of the political movements of May 68 were represented there, and every-one talked at the same time. It was chaotic and joyful, but not without efficiency!

After May 68, Pierre did something that I greatly admired. He stopped painting until 1974 to devote himself to activ-ism. He worked in a printshop on rotary presses, and in that way, he’d been faith-ful to our commitments from 1968.

While we’d never been out of touch, we really got together again after the first Saga print fairs at the Grand Palais in 1988. The Saga was a salon for fine art editions created by the organizers of the Fiac. What we saw there was mostly editioned work on paper, namely a lot of intaglio prints and lithographs. We then began working together and have since published at least one print a year. Pierre quickly understood that screen-printing would give him a unique flexi-bility regarding printing surfaces, and we wasted no time making prints on plastic, recuperated materials, metal or glass.

Pierre has remained faithful to themes that are important to him: censoring, or blacking-out, scavenging, reusing mate-rials from daily life, the works Avec… (With) or D’après… (From). But with my admiring complicity, he knew how to make new and innovative propositions with respect to the traditional edition of prints. Quite often, when I’d go to his studio in Maisons-Alfort to talk to him about a new edition, I’d leave with a project which I truly felt had never been done before. I’m thinking of En TGV (In the TGV), printed on galvanized steel, En 2 CV, made on glass in the form of a 2 CV windshield, or Hommage aux Stella (Homage to the Stellas), printed on prepatinated zinc, and I could list many others.

This exhibition is the occasion to bring together some of this work, and to thereby pay tribute to Pierre Buraglio’s creativity and his interest for editioned prints.

It’s also the occasion for me to say what a pleasure it’s been for me to take part in this adventure.