a facility is rare in a business this size, and it has enabled us to tackle a large variety of artistic projects. L’Atelier will remain artisanal in scale, and I’ll rarely have more staff, but its equipment will be modern.

In 1983, we began to publish the work of illustrators. For the first time, we really worked on our image and on communication. We published Chaland, Loustal, Floc’h and Willem. Our editions were widely diffused in the world of comics and illustration, which would be quite useful for us in the future. I even exhibited at Angoulême (at the Festival de la Bande Dessinée) two or three years in a row.

In 1987, the Oip (Organisation Idées Promotion)–which organized the Fiac–created the Saga, the Salon de l’édition d’art at the Grand Palais. This was very exciting. For the first time, we had a real platform, and this salon would influence our choices as publishers. We then decided to work with contemporary artists, and this is how the first editions were created with Pierre Buraglio (whom I’d met in 1968), Frédérique Lucien and Claude Viallat... We drifted away from the illustrators, but our relationship with them remained intact. The Saga exhibited many works on paper, etchings, lithographs, woodcuts... It soon became clear that screenprinting gave us great advantages in terms of print-ing surfaces, because it was possible to print on metal, wood, glass, and all kinds of recuperated materials... Artists like Pierre Buraglio, François Bouillon and Claude Viallat quickly saw the interest of these possibilities, and at the Saga we began showing editions printed on flour sacks (Claude Viallat), glass or galvanized steel (Pierre Buraglio, François Bouillon). These experimental prints, which I still find to be innovative to this day, have contributed towards our image as a contemporary art publisher, thus giving us the possibility to exhibit at Art Basel for three years in a row (from 1997 to 1999), and also, once the Saga no longer existed, to be among those publishers selected for the Fiac, where we still exhibit.

The activity of a fine art publisher, who essentially breaks even, gener-ates a highly positive image of his activity but with little financial ben-efit. L’Atelier has therefore gotten by with commissioned work–and it’s still the case–by refining the services it has to offer. To make the most of our technical specificities, we’ve relied heavily upon half-tone printing, stochastic or random screening, and very fine screening. Today, we’re known for our expertise in the mastery of these tech-niques, and there is little competition. Our uniqueness is reflected in our collaborations on projects or on artists’ books with galleries.

We’ve been able to forge a path into the book trade, thanks firstly to a partnership with a gallery that represents illustrators, the Galerie