Aucune mesure n’est exacte — “No measurement is exact” — starts with a square. Carlos Bernal Barrera printed that square again and again until the marks accumulated into a grid, and the book is the record of what happened along the way. The operation is simple; the result is not. What begins as a clean geometric instruction becomes a field of small deviations, each sheet carrying the traces of a single file pushed through ink, paper, and machine.

The method is deliberately reduced. A digital document is sent to press repeatedly, and the physical conditions of printing — the behaviour of the printer, the grain and absorption of the paper — displace the lines by fractions. Bernal Barrera does not correct those shifts. He lets them stand as the subject. In that sense the book is less a portfolio of images than a study of reproduction itself, and of the distance between an immaterial file and a tangible printed signature.

That distance has occupied artists since the rise of mechanical copying, but this project keeps its terms extremely narrow. There is no rhetoric of uniqueness, no dramatic manipulation. The grid holds, and the variations gather inside it. The result is a work that asks the reader to look closely at what an edition actually is: not a set of identical objects, but a series of near-repetitions whose differences are produced by the very process meant to guarantee sameness.

Published by Lendroit Éditions in 2018, the book belongs among conceptual and artists’ publications that treat printing as a subject rather than a neutral vehicle. For a collector drawn to that territory, its value lies in the clarity of the proposition and in the fact that the argument is made in the physical book, page by page, rather than explained away.