Production and photography collapse in an experimental metaobject that takes Simonet's four-generation offset printing legacy as subject, method and site of production.

French artist Jean-Vincent Simonet works at the bleeding edge of photography, painting and mixed media, in an alchemical practice of reworking, overprinting and creating slippages within print processes, refined over the last decade inside the four walls of his own family's print works in Bourgoin-Jallieu, a fourth-generation enterprise to which the artist stands at the edge of that lineage. The title recalls a memory of his father coming home from the factory with blue hands from cyan ink, absorbed into skin that smelled of labour and dedication. In anticipation of the factory changing hands, Simonet has undertaken an exhaustive inventory of its innards, using the site itself as subject in the breaks between production schedules, evenings, weekends and holidays.

Cyan Years is characterised by a sequence that swirls and congeals like wet ink, mixing press interventions, tests and finished works, snapshot images that reference out towards Simonet's wider practice, the factory and family archive, and more. Holding these different registers together is the core series, Heirloom, which regurgitates the mass of materials, objects and information that constantly run through a printing factory into original artworks that bear the traces of their origin.

Somewhere between index, archive and artist's book, Cyan Years holds the tension between the slippery distortions of Simonet, who sometimes lets all trace of the photographic wash away entirely, and the precise gestures of mechanics and expertise that his works both interrupt and uplift, the artistry and labour of those who deliver, discreetly, the printed matter of our quotidian: cheese labels, town hall flyers, holiday brochures, and this book. At once personal and experimental, Cyan Years marks a specific period within Simonet's practice, the years in which the factory served as both tool and subject, and a farewell to an industrial family heritage whose future now hangs in the balance, part of a slow, symptomatic decline of offset printing across Europe.

Like a Möbius strip, Cyan Years presents itself as an object with looping endings: images of the factory are further reworked and adapted within its own walls, only for these eventual artworks to be digitised, proofed and reproduced by the very offset processes they depict, with the book printed entirely inside the factory and subject to on-press interventions directly by the artist and publisher.

• Jean-Vincent Simonet (b. 1991, France) is an artist whose practice interrogates how images are made, altered, and circulated. A 2014 graduate of ECAL, he has exhibited at Fotomuseum Winterthur, FOAM Amsterdam, and Centre de la Photographie Genève, and his work is held in collections including the Musée de l'Élysée, the Vontobel Art Collection, and the LUMA Foundation. His publications include Kitengela (Mousse Publishing, 2024), Waterworks (RVB Books, 2021), and In Bloom (SPBH Editions, 2018). Since 2019, he has been a lecturer at ECAL in Lausanne. He lives and works between Paris and Zurich.

• 176pp, 118 colour plates, 190 × 260 mm
• Section-sewn OTA-bound softcover with multiple paper stocks
  
  
• Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon & Jean-Vincent Simonet
  Designed by Jean-Vincent Simonet & Loose Joints Studio
  With texts by James Langdon & Salomé Burstein
  Published by Loose Joints
  
  
• LJ228, November 2026
• ISBN 978-1-912719-81-5

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