Never satisfied and ever ready to expand what she had learned, this development gradually led her to create naturally-dyed paper collages with textile, print, and silk screen additions. She has evolved her own techniques which clearly reflect her past training and radiate her individual vision of life. She also makes natural fiber papers from such plants as sedge, nettles, thistles, ferns, and abaca. Her interests have extended further to encompass the study of paper's fragility and obliteration, its transparency and deterioration. Her twenty years' experience with photography are a source of inspiration and assistance in her exploration. Until very recently her work focused on traditional techniques and natural fiber paper. In her latest work she has turned to book-objects. Cheminement I (1987) and Cheminement II (1988) are unique and significant book-objects made of naturally-dyed, silkscreened, rag paper, constituting in their entirety intensely felt sculptural volumes. There is sufficient irony in de Caritat's work for her book-objects to be considered post-modernist. Audacity is needed to remove the book from its place in a classical and even elitist culture, steeped in tradition, and to transform the context in which the book is viewed in contemporary mass culture. Utilizing space, this complementary context confers on the book-object an impression of totality: Pages fragiles (1987), a book-object made of rag paper and sedge fibers, with silk-screened imagery, can today be found in the collection of the Mariemont Royal Museum. A close look at these book objects highlights the historical yet surprising link that exists between the concept of the repetitive imagery of words and the broad expanse of the paper. The pages, sparsely imprinted and loosely and imaginatively bound together, give equal significance to the reposeful paper. The sensitive void embracing the word. The penetration of the printed word. No absurd nihilism but unanswered questions, repetitive, provisionally leaving intact de Caritat's positive vision of life. And yet is the answer not already to be found? Not forced upon us but conveyed with the greatest sincerity, on behalf of herself and others. This paper, as book-object, without letters, speaks louder than the endlessly repeated word. In her essay Papier als autonome kunst (Deus ex Machina, No. 46), Lieve Verbeelen describes the recent development of this art. Her own paper reliefs, white as snow, are poetry and reasoned silence. In contrast, de Caritat has experimented along these lines in a more expressive but equally sensitive form. She has recently ventured into larger formats, as with Ecritures Perdues I (1988), a book object of sedge and sisal fiber paper. In all of this work Anne Goy has been responsible for the appropriate binding. B[']eatrice de Caritat's book-objects bear witness with extraordinary vitality to her vision of the present. It is not by chance that she was invited, in the summer of 1989, to visit Japan in order to take part in an international paper conference.
