I am in my father's workshop, a carpenter by trade, he practiced this profession throughout his career, he passed away seven years ago and my mother, more recently.

Today we need to consider selling the house, and for that reason, empty the workshop, the woodshed, the junk room, and everything else: tires, garden furniture, firewood, joists, half-finished logs, several cubic meters of pallets cut into pieces to fuel the boiler, old bicycles, the machines, power tools, nails, screws, hinges, door handles, chemical anchor guns, rivet guns, a floor sander, hand sanders, tools whose use I don't know, some furniture of course, tables, round tables, props, clamps, ornate cladding panels for making radiator covers, ladders, stepladders, bags of wood shavings, a ping-pong table, a million different things in all kind and a wooden crate.

In this crate are scraps of macassar wood, ebony wood that comes from Indonesia. I'm going to use these scraps, these small pieces of equal or nearly equal size, to try to talk about my father, my printer uncle, my grandfather.

The scraps are all roughly the same length and thickness. On one side, they have cutting imperfections, striations, and breaks. I use them as ink pads, and I get (in my opinion) rows of patterns reminiscent of the lines of stamps used in printing during my grandfather's time as a printer to print the stories of that era. These aren't sentences written out in full, of course, but I see in them the language of wood, my father's language in his own way, and I remember the music of that particular language in the workshop: the noise of the machines, the smells of sawdust, glue, and varnish that still transport me back to the time of his work. And the music of the printing press itself—the inks, the presses, the rolls of paper—that industrious atmosphere of which I have some wonderful memories, but others could describe it much better.

The columnar alignment is reminiscent of the lines of a text that one would margin on the left, the striations and breaks are the words, the pieces of wood glued onto the painting are part of a painting that I dismantled to use the pieces, a painting that I made from elements of a wardrobe that I had in my childhood bedroom but that's another story.