Marquetry on parchment

The series of works in parchment and sawn wood is composed primarily of fragments gleaned from the workshops or forests Pierre Henri explores. They are sometimes 18th-century, veneered from period furniture or simply scraps destined to trash, but often marked by intense color. Like a collector, he classifies them in order to preserve them until the right moment.

What interests him is the memory of these materials, the traces of sawing, the snags of the toothed plane, all elements that time does not erase and that Pierre-Henri Beyssac cherishes, more than the technical quality required for their assembly. To work his woods, he favors the most demanding and preferably non-mechanical techniques, in order to preserve all the tannin and depth of the fiber, without distorting the original color of the wood.

In marquetry, differences in thickness are prohibited. But in his series of marquetry on parchment, Pierre-Henri Beyssac goes against this prohibition by superimposing the veneers, to play with thickness and create shadows or reliefs. The singularity of these works lies in the assembly of the pieces of wood, which are no longer inlaid in the parchment background, but glued onto it. The parchment alone is a major asset in the aesthetic quality of these works, chosen for its grain and chromatic intensity, absent from wood species.