“Dans les cahiers de lait les enfants ont grandi…”
“…ils ont rusé avec le miel des doigts…”
— Tristan Tzara, Parler Seul
In UNDERTOW, Damien Daufresne plunged into the undercurrents of perception and memory — a visual and tactile space where images bled into textures, into skin, into silence. “We are our own universes,” he proposed, and the book opened like a personal cosmos: layered, fragile, elemental. A deep inward pull — the undertow — of all that moves beneath the visible.
The Overmorrow is not a continuation, but a counterpoint. A fable, told like a bedtime story — one that shifts with each retelling, leaving room for silence and invention. “Dans les cahiers de lait les enfants ont grandi,” wrote Tristan Tzara: in the milk notebooks the children have grown. In Daufresne’s vision, these children build with honey-stained fingers, in landscapes of shadows and clearings. The book unfolds like a world half-seen, half-imagined — where light is a memory and monsters might be real.
The Tzara line is more than a quote — it’s a key. Daufresne’s images embrace the surreal, the metamorphic, the whispered. In place of narrative, he gives us myth; instead of answers, ambiguity. The scratched film, the marks, the absences — these are not defects, but openings. Like childhood itself, the work is full of ambivalence, tenderness, and unspoken things.
Together, UNDERTOW and The Overmorrow trace a movement: inward, and then beyond. One pulls us into the raw grain of memory; the other releases us into a dream of what might come. Between them is the silent moment of becoming — the precise place where a child touches the page, and begins to build the world.
