Edmond Baudoin

(French- Nice, 1942)

La ligne, un horizon; le corps, une rivière

(‘A line, a horizon; the body, a river’)

Original art exhibition - 20 June to 5 September 2020

Overview:

The artwork of French draughtsman and bande dessinée author Edmond Baudoin(Nice, 1942) is fluid, varied, and still in its infancy. Despite being a consolidated name within the world of French-speaking comics, his practice is an exponential convergence of graphic diaries, travelogues, intimate writing, calligraphy painting, and portraiture. If there are intrinsic rules to comics-making, Baudoin would not know them. And being the creative act something incredibly personal and singular, in his pages there is always room for the other. There is room for dialogue, correspondence, collaboration, or even the very presence of the others, whether they are artists or not, long-time friends or people who Baudoin just met for the minutes necessary to draw their faces, looking them on the eye. This exhibition is an encounter with three of his books, three of his gestures, books which are themselves consequential encounters.

La ligne, un horizon; le corps, une rivière(“The line, a horizon; the body, a river”) presents the original art of three recent books by the author. Very different from one another, they nonetheless are powerful examples of some of the recurrent concerns and the permanent dialogues of the author.

Le Corps Collectif (Gallimard: 2019) is a sort of a long observation notebook or essay. For a few months, Baudoin visited the contemporary art studio & research company Le Corps Collectif, founded by choreographer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier in 2009. He shared with the company their moments of warm ups, reharsals, discussions, creation processes, as well as some of the shows and external actions. Just as he did before withQuestions de Dessin (2002) andLa Musique du Dessin(2005), this is a book that interrogates in different manners the very reason of a drawing, by investigating both its automatisms and the learning that goes into it, both the aspects a drawing is able to command and the unexpected turns. Just as he did in so many other projects, the dialogue that Baudoin engages in opens up a space for these other people to express themselves by their own words, along with their portrait. Above all, these outstanding drawings are formed by the blissful pursuit of the moving bodies, the ceaseless movement of search and loss of the traced object.

Baudoin’s oeuvre has always had a number of inflections. After a fashion, travelogue comics have been present since the beginning of his comic career, and he has participated in several collective volumes. From 1991 onwards, with Couma Acò, Baudoin also began his explorations about the life of his family members, friends and lovers, creating a complex autobiographical waltz. In 1995, with La Diagonale des Jours, he created his first four hands book, with Tanguy Dohollau, in a sort of graphic letters exchange. Finally, in 2011, he created his first partnership with Jean-Marc Troub’s, Viva la Vida!: los sueños de Ciudad Juárez. Its mission was to visit a country in which crimes against human dignity were taking place, and the opportunity for a direct contact with the victims is made possible, so that one can say, “tell me your dream.” The portraits and testimonials gathered by both authors – something they would do once again in Le Goût de la terre, taking place in Bogotá, and Humains, la Roya est un fleuve (L’Assocciation, 2018), the second book that comprises the heart of this exhibition –, have been some of the most touching, empathic and urgent graphic gestures of the last decade.

Humainstakes place “closer to home,” given that the Roya is a small rivulet whose source is in France and whose estuary is in Italy. In this Mediterranean place, that acts as a border in multiple ways, the two artists come across migrants from Sudan, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Chad, Afghanistan, and the many humanitarian associations that try to help them, in search of the same human responses. Against fratricide, religious, ethnic, social, and economic violence, and the inhumanity they meet at the beaches of Europe, sometimes the sheer predisposition of an artist to sit down, draw one’s portrait, as he asks for one’s name and dream, is a profound and lasting act of solidarity and restoration.

La Traverse(L’Association, 2019) is a dialog between two diaries, even though materialized through Baudoin’s signature. The spreads, included in the exhibition, that present landscapes living between direct, natural observation, an empathic vision that goes well beyond the human, and fusional dreams, are from this volume. Co-signed by Mariette Nodet, a competition skier, climber, and trekker, the book focuses on her trekking trip with her daughter, across the beautiful and rough foothills of the Himalayas, across India and Nepal, as she mourns her late husband. Hers are the jotted down words, hers are the memories that delineate the landscapes, the peoples, the encounters, but all of them are embodied, ink on paper, through Baudoin’s hands, who also inserts himself further by interrogating his own travels, his own personal mountains, his own encounters and desires to fly and ascend, expressed by his drawing tools.

Ever since his very first book, a collection of short social/science fiction stories in 1981, Baudoin has put out around 80 titles. Working on fiction, literary adaptations, responding to institutional commissions, creating four hand projects, composing from field drawings, interviews or simply opening confession spaces, each and every one of these books dovetail into one another in the most subtle and trenchant ways, making quite clear to the returning reader the idea that Baudoin is creating a “Continuous Poem” (an expression from Portuguese poet Herberto Helder).

Only a decades-old dedication to the unremetting and diverse practice of drawing, upheld by doubts and detours – Baudoin's education and very first professional life was quite distant from the creative world –, and a slow yet hard-hitting exposure of the self through art as one discovers it – autobiography and life became the centre of this oeuvre progressively, until the author broke free completely from the constraints of genres, fictions and even formats – can lead one to reach the supernal level of draughtsmanship of Edmond Baudoin. Somewhat similar to his artist-heroes, which he quotes textually and verbally, the Chinese painter scholar Shi Tao, named “the bitter pumpkin monk” (born in Guangxi, 1641, died 1719), and Katsushika Hokusai (Edo-Tokyo, 1760-1849), mature age is but a new step for letting go of things, for finding new fortunes and forces, and new beginnings. Take a moment to look at the face of the old woman that is found in the last scene of Le Corps Collectif, sculpted by a jumble of loose, minute, swift lines that are held together by the force of gravity of a core that becomes that character, a work as minute as it is expressive, reminiscent of Rembrandt’s late etchings. Or notice as his half-dried brush marks the leaves of a tree, or the sides of a mountain, or how it caresses the angular contours of a seaside rock, how it folds the waves, how it darkens the terrifying shadows of a lonely night, or how it embraces and solidifies multiple, dancing bodies, in their ambition for unison.

The brotherhood of these subjects, from the human body to the meandering river, from the bending of a mountain to the expanding of an horizon, from the humanity of a single face to the revelation of one’s name, is embodied by every single line and blot of the French master, who is still searching, questioning, learning.

Short Bio by Baudoin himself:

A curriculum... I'm 78 years old, how do you expect me to write up a CV? I would need a 1000 page book.
I was born in Nice, France, in 1942.
I did not pursue any studies, and left school when I was 16 (the required minimum at the time).
I have 5 children. And 9 grandchildren.
I've put out a hundred books.
My books have won awards, 3 times in Angoulême. Some have been translated. Into Chinese, Russian, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian...
For 3 years, I worked for a Japanese publisher.
I've been drawing ever since I was a child, but I had another job before I made drawing my job. I was an accountant up until I was 32 years old.
I was 40, when I published my first book.
I have created choreographies for contemporary dance. I've created songs.
I was a lecturer in a university in Quebec for three years.
There are two movies made about me.
In most of my books, I'm both the scriptwriter and the artist, but I've worked with other authors and writers.