Odilon Redon : Nouvelles et Contes Fantastiques

Description

A painter of dreams, apparitions, and the dim, secret gleams of the soul, Odilon Redon reveals himself here as a writer, entering a realm where reality is transformed by the touch of dream. These ten stories, long hidden in the shadow of his pictorial work, summon the uncanny into the heart of everyday life, until the boundary between what is seen and what is sensed begins to blur. A fevered night, a cry, a face, a journey, or a chance encounter is enough to tip the world into an unsettling strangeness, where the irrational moves on silent feet.
Redon's prose, visionary and vibrant, seems to extend the darkness of his art: with words, he conjures inner landscapes inhabited by mystery, vertigo, and poetry. Echoing these texts, the graphic works placed as frontispieces to each tale create a secret dialogue between image and word, between what is revealed and what the imagination can only glimpse. Guided by Alexandra Strauss's illuminating introduction, this collection unveils a little-known facet of Redon's work and invites us to cross with him that fragile threshold where reality begins to dream.