Sammy Stein, c’est Edgar P. Jacobs sans Blake et Mortimer. Que reste-t-il ? Les récitatifs, la grotte, le souterrain, le secret de la pyramide et son passage des initiés. [+]

DE LA BANDE DESSINÉE COMME UN ART POST-CONCEPTUEL FRANÇAIS « Visages du temps – nous informe la présentation de l’éditeur – réunit 17 récits auto-édités ou parus dans des revues étrangères ou en ligne. Certains ont été augmentés de quelques pages et/ou colorisés et sont accompagnés de notes précisant les contextes (publications réalisées lors de résidences ou d’expositions), de quelques photos et documents. » Alors évidemment les puristes vous diront que rien ne vaut les versions originales imprimées en risographie et reliées par piqûre à cheval. Mais ce que les puristes oublient, c’est que les bandes dessinées peuvent gagner quelquefois à être recueillies. Les bandes expérimentales de Sammy Stein ne dérogent pas à la règle. Ces bandes dessinées sans personnages visibles, sans véritables histoires et sans enjeux narratifs clairs n’ont jamais été sans saveur, mais leur brièveté initiale ne permettait pas toujours de retenir celle-ci. Le cumul induit par le recueil permet à cette saveur de se préciser, entre « salade de fruits abîmés » et « pizza de feuilles mortes ». La didactique mélancolique de ces visites guidées et de ces catalogues raisonnés imaginaires détaille avec délicatesse les délectations promises par des artefacts fanés et des ruines numériques. Et les propos échangés qui passent la simple blague d’atelier doivent leur vraisemblance aux heures passées par l’auteur sous les spots des vernissages. Sammy Stein, dont le nom minéral annonce les objets les plus souvent visibles dans ses planches, a une voix. Le recueil de ses bandes l’amplifie. Car ces bandes dessinées, qui rapportent parfois les propos de personnages invisibles car réfugiés dans l’espace inter-iconique, ne sont pas sans auteur. Et devrait-on immédiatement ajouter : sans narrateur. Sammy Stein, c’est Edgar P. Jacobs sans Blake et Mortimer. Que reste-t-il ? Les récitatifs, la grotte, le souterrain, le secret de la pyramide et son passage des initiés. Sammy Stein, c’est aussi L’Arche du Captain Blood devenue papier et dont le tableau de bord aurait été redessiné par Druillet. Car ses cases subjectives doivent moins à La Dame du lac de Robert Montgomery ou même à « The Stroll » de Daniel Clowes qu’à la vue à la première personne des jeux vidéo. Mais Sammy Stein, c’est aussi la seule complétion satisfaisante de L’Alph-Art. Ici, Tintin est vraiment devenu une œuvre d’art. Ancien élève de l’atelier d’Annette Messager aux Beaux-Arts de Paris, Sammy Stein a fait du monde de l’art sa seconde nature. Et tous les efforts faits dans ces paysages d’apocalypse ont toujours comme horizon un vernissage. L’œuvre de Sammy Stein représente ainsi l’ultime variation d’une série bien française sur le passage de la fiction au réel, qui a été initiée par les Walt Disney Productions de Bertrand Lavier, et a été prolongée par les œuvres de la série « No more reality » de Philippe Parreno (à la grande fureur initiale de Lavier, du reste, comme me l’a appris un jour un directeur d’un grand centre d’art). Réserve faite que Stein fournit le point de départ comme le point d’arrivée, et brouille ainsi la frontière réel/fiction. Ce qui fait qu’il pourrait aussi être un membre secret du Cercle Ramo Nash, ce collectif fictif d’artistes anonymes appartenant à la collection Yoon Ja et Paul Devautour nommé en référence à l’artiste de L’Alph-Art et dont l’œuvre Mandala Euro Disney (1995) ne déparerait pas dans une des nombreuses visites d’exposition fictives représentées dans les pages de Visages du temps. Sammy Stein, c’est finalement la réponse française au genre nord-américain du récit graphique de formation dans une école d’art (de « Art school confidential » de Daniel Clowes à Wendy, master of art de Walter Scott). Cette réponse est plus intéressante que ce genre. Et l’une des raisons pour lesquelles c’est le cas, c’est que Sammy Stein ne nourrit aucune haine cachée vis-à-vis de l’art contemporain (n’est-ce pas Clowes ? Ware ? Matthew Thurber ?). Et pour cause : Sammy Stein fait de l’art contemporain en bande dessinée, dans tous les sens possibles de cet énoncé. [-]

This narrative Sammy describes is often joyfully nonsensical. [+]

GO YOUR OWN WAY: THE SELF-PUBLISHING COMIC BOOK MOGUL, SAMMY STEIN. Illustrator Sammy Stein is an example of how self-publishing your work, starting a zine, or initiating a collective of artists are all great alternatives to promote your practice. The Paris-based comic book artist has achieved all three, developing his own route to “experiment with different narrative mediums”. This narrative Sammy describes is often joyfully nonsensical. By creating his own platform to sell his work Sammy has built a fanbase that expects no rules or regulations, they go to him for unconventional comics unavailable elsewhere. Back in 2009 he co-founded Collection Revue an independent magazine showcasing contemporary drawings as well as Lagon Revue in 2014 a collective project of exploratory Risograph and silkscreen comics. Within the illustrator’s own series The Work storylines are depicted in long formatted comic strips, with curious drawings and diagrams that you can’t help but scroll further and further down to find out more. The illustrator additionally uses an unfamiliar colour palette compared to most comic drawings. Sammy chooses a deadpan selection of colours, browns and beiges frequently combined with a vibrantly popping centre piece to draw the readers eye to a subject. Within The Work this can be seen in varied objects from hands, architecture or a rose, whatever Sammy sees fit. [-]

“I try to find different ways to tell stories, by changing the point of view of the narrator or finding some new tricks” [+]

INISPIRED BY SCI-FI AND MYTHS, SAMMY STEIN’S ILLUSTRATIONS ARE A POSTMODERN ODE TO THE PAST. The last time we spoke to Paris-based illustrator Sammy Stein, it was his dexterity in self-publishing and comic book strips that caught our eye. Four years down the line and Sammy has continued to impress us, producing around a dozen new personal zines and books, as well as taking up numerous art residencies. He’s also completed two issues of his book Lagon Revue as well as two more issues of Collection Revue magazine. The first, Sammy describes, is a “prospective comics anthology” that’s run in collaboration with Alexis Beauclair, Séverine Bascouert of L’institut sérigraphique and Jean-Philippe Bretin. Four issues have been released since 2016, with the aim of publishing one each year. The latter, Collection Revue, is now in its 10th anniversary and is a magazine filled with interviews with artists, graphic designers, publishers and cartoonists. Alongside these prosperous projects, Sammy has continued to travel the world in order to inspire his work. 2017 was the year that saw the illustrator join an art residency in Colombia with Séverine —a printer and publisher whom he works with often. “We made the book Turtle Museum which is a fake guide inspired by the art museum, el Museo de la Tertulia, located in Cali, where we lived for two weeks,” he tells It’s Nice That. The result is a publication crafted from riso, silkscreen and hot foil —within, you can read “weird facts” and discover art works, “browsing between fiction and reality”. Then, in 2018 and 2019, Sammy traversed to Asia (Japan, Taiwan and China to be exact) to exhibit work in a few shows and book fairs. “We had a lot of projects on this year, but everything has been stopped by the coronavirus,” he says. “We’re taking this time to work on new books.” Despite the current climate, Sammy’s work has flourished since his last feature. After his studies in art at Beaux-Arts de Paris, he began to experiment with sound, video and drawings, which transpired into the making of his first-ever comic book. Since then, he’s continued to work in his chosen medium, taking walks in the cities “weird areas”, ruins, natural or fake landscapes for daily inspiration. “A mysterious monster garden in Italy, an old 70s park in Osaka, speaking with people, listening to synthesiser music, visits bookshops around the world” —these, he tells us, are just a few small moments that effortlessly influence him. Sammy’s working process tends to revolve around the juggling of various projects —whether that’s a comic book, illustration, exhibition or for one of his two magazines. At the start of a new project, Sammy points out the importance of a narrative. “I try to find different ways to tell stories, by changing the point of view of the narrator or finding some new tricks; I have several lines of research, but I’m really interested in objects that tell stories.” An example of this can be seen from a comic he created last year, a printed zine titled The Boardgames for Marécage (Lagon #5). A story about people playing a board game, he challenged himself by creating it without any direct references to the world of board games —no elves, trolls or creatures. Then, last summer, Sammy and his long-term collaborator Séverine —plus 10 other artists— were invited to an artist residency put together by artists Margaux Duseigneur, Antoine Marchalot, Chloé Munich, Vincent Lalanne and Pauline Barzilaï. They all moved to a “little middle-aged town” named Uzerche to work for two weeks, whereby Sammy decided to create a zine inspired by the town and its surrounding area. “I wanted to give the city a fantastical atmosphere,” he says. The book was then translated into three different languages, including Occitan, an old french language from the area —“nobody speaks this language anymore, except some old people, nice professors and accapella singers”. It’s clear that Sammy’s interests lay predominantly among the tales and folklore of the past, with an added zest of sci-fi, art and graphic design. Next, he will continue to work on a 200-pages anthology of several zines that he’s released over the last few years —published by Éditions Matière. To top it all off, Sammy has more zines in progress, some self-produced whiles others are published independently. “One work in particular, which is almost finished, is a zine named Pompei 2079,” he concludes. “This is a story of a traveller, who walks across a giant landscape and volcano area. We follow this character during the four seasons. In summer, he meets a potter who shows him his ceramic collection and tells the story of each, before a volcano awakening” —so keep your eyes peeled! [-]

Sammy Stein’s œuvre can be divided into two categories [+]

SAMMY STEIN ON THE ART/IFACTS OF THE REAL AND THE VIRTUAL As an editor of the Lagon anthology with Alexis Beauclair, Bettina Henni, Séverine Bascouert, and Jean-Philippe Bretin, Sammy Stein is at the forefront of the new French Abstract Formalist Comics (or French Structural Comics), which employ minimalist, geometric, and graphic style with abstract narratives focusing on the formal structure of comics, similar to Structural Films from the 1970s. Sammy Stein’s œuvre can be divided into two categories. The first group is quintessential French Abstract Formalist Comics, exploiting the poetics of transformational and processional comics language. The second group features art objects in exhibitions. They all share the central theme of how the human creation of art/ificial objects mediate the dialectics of the real (immortal truth) and the virtual (fiction). [...] The first group —Moving Sculpture (2016), Sculpture (2016), Chondrite (2016), Crayon #1-2 (2016), Pyramid (2017), and Hatch (2018)— shows the process of the transformation or the creation of art/ifacts. The process is often not linear or causal. After Moving Sculpture and Sculpture, Stein developed his own comics language, blurring the line between repetition/difference and transformation by exploiting the sequential nature of comics. Usually, comics language works as a dialectic of repetition and difference as Thierry Groensteen argued in System of Comics (1999). The similar object which appears later in the comic is the same object (repetition), only with a bit of difference. However, the sequentiality of the image does not need to be limited to one possibility. Indeed transformational potential of the sequentiality has been studied previously, in both comics and art, for example in David Weiss’ Die Wandlungen [The Metamorphosis] (1975-9). The difference between repetition/difference and transformation is that for the former the object is the same, while in the latter it has a different identity. Often the process of creation includes destruction, or  the destructed relic is the end product, not a clean, finished product. We exhibit these relics in museums (the second group, especially Return to the Center (2014). We write history and stories about them. Stein’s processional and transformational comics language evokes the sense of time in the static world of comics, and the passage of time reminds us of mortality. Stein shows how humanity tries to defy mortality and the passage of time by creating and studying art (Moving Sculpture, Crayon, and Pyramid) and writing history. This is also why we make and read comics. Ars longa, vita brevis (Life is short, but art is forever). However hard we try, we can’t reach the truth, and a history can’t be the history, because histories are always subjective just as art is. In this way, Stein’s œuvre examines the relationship between the reality, truth, history, and fiction. But Stein is not pessimistic. Just as an artifact can become art after being used or destroyed, Stein’s objects keep transforming into other objects and continue in a new life. Destruction as creation. The transformation as transmigration.  cyclical nature of creation and destruction and the persistent pursuit of production is underlined by the fact that most of Stein’s first group of works are cyclical. [...] The second group —Return to the Center (2014), The Turtle Museum (2017, with Séverine Bascouert), Multimonde (2017), Salut Marcel (2018), Visages du temps (2018), and Galerie 128. Souvenirs de l'âge d'or (2018)— features art objects in exhibitions. While they have words and dialogue (English translations are included), there is no character psychology, conflict, or storyline. The narrative is actionless. We only see artworks and surroundings and hear (or read) the information about them. Characters who are talking are not depicted. [...] The universe is chaotic and nonlinear, just like Stein’s first group, but humanity strives to understand it by making and appreciating art in the way that we are reading and analyzing Sammy Stein’s works. That human yearning to defy nature is improbable in the way that Stein’s catalogue includes real and imagined artworks, but it does not mean that it is worthless. Just as we appreciate the “process” of transformation in Sammy Stein’s first group of works, the struggle itself —the art, history, study, and fiction— is invaluable. [-]

Sammy Stein studies the dialectics of virtual (fictional) and real (factual) [+]

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. [...] Sammy Stein studies the dialectics of virtual (fictional) and real (factual) via a mediation of the life history of artworks. I will write more about his œuvre in an upcoming essay. [...] [-]