Not a Wine Book

Oleg Agafonov

the project (2020-2021)

«Not a Wine Book»

The starting point of the project was the Old World and Europe in particular, since Europe is home to wine culture and the art of the printed book. Not a Wine Book is a collection of metaphors and simple meanings. As the canvas, I chose the book I have had since my university days: Emil Ruder’s Typographie: A Manual of Design. Half through the project, I realised that the choice was no accident: Emil Ruder is to typography is like Robert Parker to wine.

I came up with an idea to create a ‘book’ about wine and fill it with associations and moods because alcohol has a controversial reputation. The centuries-old culture of wine led to the creation of oenology – the science of wine. Wine is tightly woven into the modern world: it’s everywhere from cinema and literature to wine championships and harvest festivals. In this project, wine meets typography, book printing, and visual art. Now, it’s not only about wine, it is beyond wine.

The technicalities were crucial: I decided to keep the scale of the real bottle, and I used the real label from the bottle to keep the liaison with the particular winery and terroir. Then I painted a ‘portrait’ of wine. For each painting, I carefully selected pages from the book which would complement and enrich the final composition. The result was forty broadside artworks painted over the pages of the real book about typography. Together, Book + Label + Painting are a cocktail of centuries-old interaction of art and images from popular culture in the era of consumption.