Throughout his career, the Spanish artist André du Colombier (1952–2003) refused to adhere to the constraints of any specific artistic movement. His influences ranged from On Kawara to Richard Artschwager, and his work could shift from poetry one day to arte povera and conceptualism the next. He once created a piece called Le piano de Stravinsky out of five blini pans and five postcards. It all reflected a kind of aphasia. “A sentence spoken, a word lost within commentary, that he could capture in spirit and make resonate across delicate bridges of other words with a sensation perceived physically and mentally, instantaneously,” the art critic Anne Tronche said of his work in 2016. “In the days to follow, this capture of scenes, embodied in words, could become a kind of affirmation, on the monochrome surface of a shining piece of paper.” A large-scale exhibition of the taciturn artist’s work is opens in his hometown. —Elena Clavarino