At 46 years old, Olivier Schrauwen (Bruges, Belgium, 1976) is a young legend of European comics. The strong personality of all his works, his search for new forms of expression in the field of cartooning, have earned him praise from all sides, even from sacred cows like Art Spiegelman, who assured that he was the most original author he had ever met. . dropped by chance from Chris Ware or Ben Katchor. The man who is visiting Malaga and Seville today, invited by the Andalusian Agency of Cultural Institutions of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, three-day beard, shy look, arrives with a new work under his arm, Flamenco Sundaypublished in Spain, like the previous ones, by Fulgencio Pimentel.
Although he comes from a country with a gigantic comics tradition, Schrauwen assures that this fact did not weigh on his vocation as much as the environment in which he grew up. “For young people of my generation, all this splendor of Belgian comics belongs to the past,” he says. “In my case, the fact that my father was a big collector of comic books was more decisive. “If I had belonged to a different family, maybe it would have been different for me. »
The truth is that, from his first titles, like my little, The man who let his beard grow, Mowgli in the mirror either Grayan author called to test, and in his case move, the limits of the genre revealed themselves. Which does not mean that Schrauwen is willing to accept the avant-garde label. “I don’t think that’s the case. I try to create comics that are accessible to everyone, even those who are not regular readers. Yes, it’s true that I always try to find new avenues, but for fun. The boundaries of the creative process are limited and I often try to break them, but just for fun.
The inner bourgeois
On the other hand, compared to comics understood as simple escape or entertainment, Olivier Schrauwen frequently plays to open the windows on the strangeness, even on the discomfort of the reader, but always with enormous subtlety. “Obviously I’m not looking for pure entertainment. I try to approach things through my life experience and do something with them. Expel the bourgeois? “I wouldn’t say that, I believe that my work consists rather of a seduction, even of the bourgeois who lives in me.”
The caricaturist’s work reaches one of its peaks with Arsène Schrauwenan astonishing reconstruction of his grandfather’s adventures in the Congo, to continue with science fiction bordering on absurd humor from parallel lives and in the degradation of a pirate without the slightest moral support from Guy, portrait of a drinker. Now come back with Flamenco Sundaythe story in the form of a stream of consciousness, of a day in the life of his cousin Thibault, between solitude, alcohol, drugs and existential boredom, which ends up being a mirror of our time, even beyond the initial intentions of the ‘author. “In this book, I tried to be precise on the place, a small region of Belgium, and precise on the dates, autumn 2017, but the result is universal. I didn’t start the story with a preconceived idea, it just developed. And in the end, the work turned out to be darker than I imagined.
Like so many other comic strip artists, Olivier Schrauwen makes a living from his personal projects and other related professions, such as animation, even if he has never decided to direct his comic strip towards this field. “I think my books are very specific, I never wanted to make a movie out of them, although I’m currently trying to make a mix of animation and normal film that has a specific relationship to the medium. But nothing to do with my comics; I think that to bring them to the screen, I would have to rethink a lot, from the beginning, how to tell these stories.
A robotic character
Another spectrum in which the flamenco artist operates is that of musical comedy, something that is more linked to comic drawing than one might think. “I spend a lot of time doing research, looking at computer programs with lots of lines, melodic fragments, and thinking about how to organize them. And I also make my comics this way, I work with different layers and I approach them abstractly, I never do literal development.
When asked what he is reading at the moment, he answers that he is absorbed in the books of María Medem. “Since I came to Spain, I wanted to see what was being done here and I really like María’s work, as in general everything that our editor, Fulgencio Pimentel, publishes,” he says. “When I was young, we knew almost nothing about what was being done in Spanish comics, but little by little it is becoming more and more known, partly thanks to Graf from Barcelona, which, I would say, attracts an audience profile similar to that of Flanders Today, young people in my country are more familiar with the production of this region.
And the inevitable question remains for last in these times: are you afraid that Artificial Intelligence will take your job? “Not at all, not only do I not worry at all, but I find it amusing. I even hope it can help me with superficial or more mechanical work, like coloring. I looked at a few programs, in case I saw something useful, but the truth is that I haven’t found it yet. In any case, I have no problem adopting technology.
If you look closely, a work like Arsène Schrauwen Only he could have done it. Or can you imagine a machine producing it? “I don’t create,” he laughs. “The main character is very robotic, huh? “Who knows, who knows.”
