Le Vide Plein · by Ivan Dal Cin

In 1958 Yves Klein set up the famous exhibition of nothing at the Iris Clert gallery. In the same year, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli drew a rectangle, representing a void painting, at the end of a letter contesting Heisenberg's "theory of everything".

Klein's "Le Vide" was in a sense the most complete and radical solution to spatialism, followed shortly by its overthrow by Arman with "Le Plein". Were emptiness and fullness just formal or even substantial opposition? Subatomic physics was calling into question the very idea of emptiness, and at the same time was showing how at the core of matter there is more emptiness than substance.

This object book is made of 99.999998% emptiness, literally: only 2 pages out of a million have any recognizable content. These pages, placed side by side, bear traces of those two events, suggesting a profound connection. Finding the two pages inside a book that, if printed, would be at least 50 meters tall is practically impossible. A hint: consider the speed of light, expressed in km.