Passage Arcade Gallery (PAG) is a book on the work of the Belgian artist and illustrator Tille Pepermans, who graduated from KASK Ghent in 2017 with this same project as her Master’s thesis. Pepermans works exclusively in 6B pencil, building her images out of a dense interplay between deep black and the white of the paper, and the project takes its name from the covered shopping arcades she walked through and photographed as the source material for her drawings.
The book is structured as a walk of its own. The drawings are reframed and recropped at varying degrees of saturation, so that the reader moves through the work detail by detail rather than image by image, in the same way Pepermans moves through the arcades themselves. Pages of pure white and pages of saturated colour are interleaved between the drawings, holding their own against the density of the work and breaking the rhythm of the reading at intervals.
