What a funny idea to tell the life and work of Michelangelo in comics!
This is not a comic, it's just a hyper hyper illustrated art book, sentence by sentence, and even end of sentence by sentence. As a result, it gives dozens of images on which runs a same sentence. And as the images are placed side by side with text that follows, it looks like a comic.
Is not that a bit demagogic?
It would be so if I had drawn Michelangelo sculpting the Pieta or painting the Sistine Chapel, as if only his life interested us. But I only show works of Michelangelo, that the BD form allows to see in all its details.
How did this idea come to you?
In trying to transpose my movies of the series GRAND'ART (on arte) in book. Before it looked like an interesting storyboard and then to improve the graphics, I ended up finding the right solution. No page obeys the same structure. And it took me nine years to develop.
Why did you choose Michelangelo for this trial?
Because I had enough quality images, gleaned during some thirty shootings in museums and churches for only on Michelangelo. But I also intend to make Lucian Freud, Ingres, Titian, Giorgione, Correggio, Primatice, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, Caravaggio ... And also Vélasquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Cezanne, Durer, Van Eyck, Poussin, Fragonard, Picasso, Chardin, and I forget. I am a generalist, as was the case with the great 19th century art historians.
How is this work, your work, so innovative in the history of art criticism and the analysis of works?
Because I start with the picture before all things. Because everything starts from my visits to the museum and not from my readings in the library. Because I am not interested in the biography of the artist or the political context of his work, but in the way in which a painting is composed and painted, how his characters are staged, how narration is supply, etc. This table and not another.
Do you think that Michelangelo would have appreciated this way of presenting his work?
Certainly.
Do you consider yourself an art critic, a smuggler, an art detective or something else?
A critic of art who seeks to make love, and not to make understand because in truth, there is nothing to understand special when looking at a beautiful picture. Or rather, what is to be understood is written everywhere, in the guides, on the internet, on the cartel placed next to the canvas. What demands a true culture is not what one must know, but what one must be able to appreciate. I do not mean that only emotion counts and not intellect, which would be false and demagogic. I mean that only aesthetic sensibility counts, and that sensibility is not given to everybody, that it does not free itself from the education of the eye, and that it alone makes it possible to judge artists. To put it another way, when we have understood a picture (that Rembrandt's Ronde de Nuit represents this or that), we have not yet understood the picture.
Your next project?
The second volume.
"Michelangelo", "Every Michelangelo or almost in a single text and a thousand images", volume 1, by Hector Obalk, Hazan, 96 pages, 25 euros.
