ÉDITIONS MATIÈRE

Nicolas Nadé uses Abstract Formalist Comics to examine the dialectics of nature and the artificial, and the ontology of representation [+]

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. [...] Nicolas Nadé uses Abstract Formalist Comics to examine the dialectics of nature and the artificial, and the ontology of representation. Nadé’s drawing-based works employ the grammar of Abstract Formalist Comics but with some irregularities. The geometric style of FSC naturally implies some objectivity, but these irregularities invite the question of the existence of the artist. Imagined monuments frequent Nadé’s world and ask if they are imagined or abstracted. Do they belong to nature (the universe)? What is this object that the artist created? If it does not exist, how do we know it? [...] [-]