The void as a creative concept

Millions of young people were lured by the romantic and heroic ideas of war promulgated by their elders, unaware of the new mechanisms of mass destruction. Many of them joined voluntarily, abandoning their student life to fight for their country. And practically, they only experienced destruction and death on their life.

The events that consumed this younger generation and the incomprehension of the older generations caused a psychological transformation in some of these young people, who succumbed to an existentialist, nihilistic thought. There was in them a loss of meaning and purpose in life.

This is the case of our protagonist, Paul Bäumer, who throughout the novel develop an existentialist thought because he fails to glimpse the path that leads him to himself. After the death of many of his friends, he declares himself lost and says farewell to life resigned to the random will of fate. «Serene, for nothing else can take them away from me».

That void that Paul faces, and that eventually engulfs him, is the concept that has been chosen to transmit to the reader.

Just as a painter faces doubt and fear before a blank canvas, or a writer hesitates to put words on paper, the young soldier confronts the abyss that separates him from those who did not witness the war. A growing void that, unlike the painter or writer, he is unable to fill. It is a constant struggle to recover the memories of his past.

That is why the book is presented to the reader as a practically black block, in which one can observe a nebula that transitions from white to black in which the title of the book can barely be glimpsed. This representation mirrors our protagonist's mindset, as he succumbs to nothingness, and how this mindset infiltrates his life as a kind of fog that advances slowly and silently and eventually engulfs him entirely.

That's why the author's name is positioned at the bottom of the book, rather than above the title as is customary in Spanish editorial practice. The author, as a representative of soldier Paul, is situated where one is surrounded by nothingness, where the absence of color and life is most present.

To further strengthen this idea of existentialist struggle, the book is accompanied by a square support that acts as a frame and turns the book into a book-object, a kind of suprematist sculpture that encapsulates the duality between life and nothingness. The blank square space represents the society surrounding Paul Bäumer —a rectangular block— who, after the experiences of war, is unable to fit into a society incapable of comprehending the magnitude of what he had to endure.

As for the composition, the book is positioned at the bottom of it and is slightly rotated to add visual tension, giving the reader the feeling that something is wrong, that it doesn’t fit. This alludes to the soldier’s inability to fit into that society.

The experiences that he had during the war were too heavy to digest in the front, to be able to support the day to day they had to forget, although they never really forgot, those experiences «sank like stones in his interior».

About the conception of the artist's book

This edition of All Quiet on the Western Front, is accompanied by an artist's book featuring a series of illustrations inspired by the work of the artist Alberto Giacometti, combined with a concept of loss developed by the artist Jaume Plensa

The choice to base the illustrations on the work of Giacometti stems from Alberto Giacometti's remarkable ability to capture existentialist thought.

Giacometti, through his sculptures, managed to depict emptiness like no one had attempted before. His works were infused with the spirit of the era and reflected, with a painfully raw intensity, the disconnection between life and those who witnessed the world's nations becoming entangled in two increasingly destructive World Wars.

Sartre defined him as «the perfect existentialist artist. Halfway between being and nothingness». At that point, between being and nothingness, was where our protagonist found himself after knowing the reality of war, but as a result of a fact that happens to him, there is a turning point in his being that leads him to succumb to nothingness. He admits that he is still moved by feelings of nostalgia for home, the yearning to live... but for him they are no longer objectives in themselves. In his being there is a loss of purpose in life.

Above. Works made by Jaume Plensa for the Lelong gallery of New York. Shadow (study) I, 2009 and Shadow (study) LII, 2011.

The loss of substance, of content, is the one that the artist Jaume Plensa developed in a series of drawings for his exhibition at the Lelong gallery in New York, in those drawings, Plensa plays with the idea of «like wanting to take water but this one goes away». After knowing Paul’s story, I can see in those drawings our protagonist. Waiting serenely, calmly, thoughtfully, his end. «I’m calm. Months and years can come. Nothing more they can take away from me».

That’s why, based mainly on Giacometti’s work, I have joined the ideas of these two artists to make my artist’s book.

These are photographs of Giacometti’s sculptures to which a digital technique known as Pixel Sorting has been applied. This technique produces a glitch effect on the images which appear to have been corrupted, i.e. information from the image has been lost.

This digital environment has been chosen because it is a space that exists but at the same time does not exist, it is an environment that communicates a reality that technically is not real because the digital world is only disputed by zeros and ones. It is as if those images were at that point «halfway between being and nothingness».