“I like to be outside of genres and draw only humans dealing with sensations, ideas and actions” [+]

Alexis Beauclair on drawing sensations, ideas and actions to escape genres. Dedicated readers of It’s Nice That will be familiar with the work of minimalist illustrator Alexis Beauclair and how it delves into the strange and uncanny. He fills comics frames with enigmatic yet understated sequences and smooth-surfaced figures, and these signs and symbols are often left up for the readers to interpret. Most recently, we’ve written about his anthology Lagon, compiled with fellow illustrators Sammy Stein, Séverine Bascouert, Bettina Henni and Jean-Philippe Bretin, but 2019 has seen Alexis synthesising his prolific portfolio of works into a few solo publications. “So I have a few areas of research, on one side is minimalism and on the other side the strange, fusing them together sometimes,” Alexis tells It’s Nice That. “I guess it’s the fascination I have for perception and signs that’s the common thing between them. I’m captivated by how humans extract signs from nature or life and manipulate them. How they transform sensations into ideas, how something starts to be readable.” Along with recent editorial illustrations for The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New Yorker and another upcoming issue for Lagon, Alexis is publishing Free Fall in the near future with Breakdown Press, a compilation of ten short comics that he’s made in the past few years. “It puts together my silent figurative comics focused on the strange. I try to draw very clearly obscure scenes, like if you were in front of other human beings doing things you don’t understand because you don’t have the same rituals, mythology or language,” Alexis says of the publication. “Sometimes they can be read as sci-fi comics but I like to be outside of genres and draw only humans dealing with sensations, ideas and actions,” he says. Another recent project is Enigma, a Riso-printed book on black paper with grey and neon orange ink. Like a series of ominous post-human prophecies, the book continues along Alexis’ practice of creating ambiguous signs but with a more material slant. “I’ve had this line drawing practice for a couple of years now, but in the past year, I’ve been enjoying reworking them with computer colouring,” Alexis says of the book. “It totally changes the way that we look at them: they stay enigmatic, but it gives them volume and a more physical and tactile presence, like strange sculptures.” On the flip-side of this textural, oozy illustration style are Alexis’ flatter drawings that usually feature simple and solid shapes. A compilation of several years of this Loto series has recently been published by Éditions Matière. “This series is a minimalist, almost abstract, comic focused on black geometrical shapes and movements where, like in my other minimalist comics, I try to make visible some elementary mechanism of reading and comics form,” Alexis says. Through this work, he tries to uncover the grammar of a perception activated by the reading process. Created through a reflective process, the series that creates a multiplicity of interpretations is an attempt to question the formal shape of comics. If you’re still hungry for more, Alexis is also releasing a selection of 250 drawings made between 2012 and 2016, a collection of drawings from his sketchbooks, still in the process of being re-edited. “This is kind of a regular training, drawing and driving into the subconscious,” Alexis says about the daily exercise of trying out new shapes and ideas. “I love to observe things emerging from the abstract, so I try to keep this tension in the final drawings.” If you’re a fan of Alexis’ mysterious work, it seems like 2020 will be an exciting year for you. [-]

Where did this man come from? [+]

Meet the very talented, shape-loving and sci-fi comic maker Alexis Beauclair. Coming across Alexis Beauclair’s work on the enormous, vacuous gravel pit of the internet was like driving past a yard sale and screeching to a halt upon seeing a rare pinball machine you’ve been lusting after for years. Where did this man come from? Check out his bone china-coloured works spattered with post-apocalyptic, bald creatures and lines so delicate they’re like hairs that have dropped on to a scanner from above. Mixed in with all that sci-fi and whimsy is a clear passion for geometry —who knew making a series of pictures in navy triangles and circles could be so beautiful? Thank you Booooooom for showing us Alexis, he’s made our day. The only annoying thing is now we want to buy every single one of his small, beautifully-printed publications. [-]

Alexis Beauclair meticulously scrutinizes the active role of the comics reader in creating movement [+]

FRENCH ABSTRACT FORMALIST COMICS (FRENCH STRUCTURAL COMICS): AN ARTISTIC MOVEMENT In the mid-2010s, a group of young French artists began creating wordless comics with geometric and minimalist style and little or no narrative. What they show instead is more of a “process”. The emotionless and mechanical style and lack of narrative and words lead the reader to focus on the formal qualities and abstract concepts of comics, visual art, and printed media, such as space-time, movement, body, sign, texture, representation, transformation, repetition/difference, etc. I call this new budding movement French Abstract Formalist Comics. They are “Abstract” Formalist comics not because they do not show representational images —they do, and this is a critical difference between them and Abstract Comics— but because they show abstract narrative and study abstract and formalist themes, concepts, and motives. They could also be called French Structural Comics, because they are similar to works of Structural Cinema such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1968). They share a physical environment, geography, and period; artistic forms (style, aesthetics of comics); themes and motives; and formal as well as the structural features of comics, printed media, and visual art. They also share a community and platform. The prime example is the anthology Lagon, edited by Alexis Beauclair, Jean-Philippe Bretin, Bettina Henni, and Sammy Stein, all of whom are French Structural Comics artists, though not every work in Lagon is Structural Comics. (For example, Simon Hanselman was in it). Éditions Matière, which has had the seminal influence on the development of the movement, publishes many FSC. [...] Alexis Beauclair meticulously scrutinizes the active role of the comics reader in creating movement in LOTO (2012-2019). However, the casual reader hardly notices such a coup. In Vanishing Perspective (2018), Beauclair invites the reader to become the light (Photon) and direct the movement herself in Labyrinth. In the end, the three-dimensional space the reader has been investigating in her imagination becomes the reality of the actual paper by Vanishing Perspective (Sol). [...] [-]

Nothing exists without the reader [+]

K. J.― How would you describe, define, or categorize the comics you make? Abstract comics? A. B.― I would like to say minimalism. Most of the time I try to refine as much as possible, to deal with the simplest parameters, with the pure mechanics of the comics form and to conduct experiments. But I keep a certain classic comics codes: there are panels, and the reading is linear (even if I like to play with the entire page). I feel what I’m doing is more like an archeological search for the very roots of this sequential language. I like when things are between the abstract and the figurative and when figures come to surface to play with this in-between. Humans are designed (and/or acculturated?) to see signs, to try to decrypt reality so with just a little bit of information they can link things and understand some logic. I’m fascinated by this process and love to question it. K. J.― What inspired you to develop a “minimalist” style? Did you know previous so-called “abstract comics” when you started yours? A. B.― No, I didn’t know the few experiments that had been done at the time, when I started my first minimalist project (Globe, 2008). I was thinking, “It’s unbelievable that nobody has ever done it yet! Why did the comics form wait so long to liberate itself from literature or illustration”. I dived into it intuitively. My first and biggest inspirations are maybe (adventures) comics in general that I had read, like Spirou or Tintin. For me, it’s about movement. Each comic book is a rush forward; the reader is led by the character walking, running, jumping, falling (ok they are also talking) within landscapes. And this movement doesn’t exist on its own like in the cinema. The movement is created by reading. And reading is a movement. So I try to find what kind of energy drives comics beneath all the artifices (characters, stories, and anecdotes). Distill the comic to the maximum to reach its essence: movement. What I love is composing images with shapes and lines so that the reader can decrypt these signs and imagine or feel the movement. Nothing exists without the reader; s/he is active; s/he projects her or his own experience into the life of movement; s/he applies physical laws to fixed images printed on paper. I’m enchanted by this mental exercise. To associate images, to combine signs, to question them and drive drawings toward abstraction as if they were an imaginary language. [lire la suite sur le blog de Kim Jooha.] [-]