ROB WYNNE, Radiant Darkness, Galerie Mitterrand, Paris, 2023

Offset-printed invitation card issued for Radiant Darkness, Rob Wynne's exhibition at Galerie Mitterrand, Paris, 7 January–4 March 2023. The recto reproduces I Wish I Was You (2005), photogram, 50.8 × 40.6 cm — white liquid-form lettering on a black ground. The verso carries exhibition dates, vernissage information and gallery details.

Wynne's earliest working context was Mail Art. He met Ray Johnson, founder of the New York Correspondence School, in the 1970s, and later recalled that Johnson introduced him to working with typewriters and Western Union; the two developed what Wynne described as an epistolary relationship. Language travelling through the post sits at the beginning of his practice, well before the poured mirrored-glass text works he is now best known for.

Radiant Darkness gathered around fifty works spanning five decades — portraits, landscapes, photograms, embroidered clothing and natural-history material — and was reviewed in The Art Newspaper in relation to art history's minor, less orthodox avant-gardes. The same year, Craig Starr Gallery in New York mounted AFTERGLOW alongside the publication of Obstacle Illusion, Wynne's first comprehensive monograph. Together, 2023 reads less as a retrospective endpoint than an active reassessment of a fifty-year practice already represented in collections including MoMA, the Whitney, Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The invitation compresses that eclecticism to one black field and one phrase. I Wish I Was You begins as a photogram addressed to an unspecified recipient. Printed on an invitation, it takes on a second function: an object meant to reach an actual addressee. Wynne began with language travelling through the post. Fifty years later, the work returns to circulation as an invitation.

15 × 21 cm. Condition: very good, with light handling and edge wear consistent with distribution. Verso clean.