Die Hitze In Paris

In his works about the "heat (Hitze) in Paris", Andreas Seltzer takes the record-breaking summer of 2003 as a pretext to draw fantastic plans in which it is imagined how the city's framework of order is melting and how this opens the view to the history of small and large revolts, to grotesque incidents, erotic entanglements, and everyday catastrophes.

The book was published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin. In addition to many illustrations (art and cultural-historical material placed with a sense for the situational; found objects from the idiosyncratic "Seltzer Collection" – photos, postcards, flyers, newspaper clippings, advertising graphics, and other bizarre objects with an astonishing thematic relation; contributions by other artists; Seltzer's own works), the volume captivates the reader with an associatively interwoven selection of short text passages by a number of authors (Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Henry Miller, Paul Nizan, Georges Bataille, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, and Heinrich von Kleist, to name but a few), which Seltzer uses to delve deeper into his theme, the "heat in Paris".

The neat and handy book is supplemented by reproductions of three of Andreas Seltzer's works from his series of drawings of the same name. His drawings of Paris can be seen as inner maps of the artist. The network of paths marked with red broken lines is teeming with miniature architectures, masks, and scenes with animals and humans. Plus a legend, a key that nobody cares to read – the only thing that matters here is form: elaborate, manic, and fascinating.