“Small boxes, big spaces”: when comics are exhibited at Compa, in Chartres

Thirty-nine artists spread over 320 m², 250 plates, including 180 originals… the exhibition Petites cases, grands spaces, which has just started at the Compa de Chartres, immediately impresses with its scale.

This installation, imagined by Sandrine Le Flohic, exhibition curator, and Thierry Groensteen, scientific curator, takes the landscape in the comic strip as its starting point.

“A fairly new subject”, according to the tandem. So new, in fact, that most of the works collected here are rather recent. With rare exceptions, all the drawings are less than ten years old.

Journeys from the Loire to the Desolation Islands

“The world of comics is in full expansion, and the theme of landscape only emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. For many contemporary authors, it is no longer a simple setting, but a essential element of the narrative, even a character in its own right”, deciphers Thierry Groensteen.

Chaptered in eight parts, the exhibition surprises with the diversity of subjects addressed and techniques used by the artists. The original plates are executed with great virtuosity in graphite, watercolor, gouache… Some, painted in “direct colors”, resemble real paintings.

But beyond the technical dexterity, certainly essential, it is the imagination of the authors that is striking. Long considered childish, comics have evolved enormously, which even non-specialists can only recognize when viewing this exhibition.

Through large, spectacular formats, or on the contrary with the help of modest sketches, spectators find themselves immersed in very varied worlds: jungle, marshes, forest… We are often very far from Eure-et-Loir, as on these impressive drawings where a boat which seems very frail tries to make its way through a blue and threatening universe.

Are we in a parallel world, imagined by a fantasy author like HP Lovecraft? No, this is just an extract from Journey to the Desolation Islandssigned Emmanuel Lepage.

Coming of age

Other works are geographically much closer to us, but they retain all their artistic ambition. This is the case of Loireby Etienne Davodeau, published last year, the drift of a narrator in the midst of romantic torment, as well as an exploration of a landscape and the ecological issues that cross it.

Because this is also the message of this large installation. The landscape is not only a marvelous place where a grandiose narrative unfolds, it is also a fragile ecosystem that must be protected. Exploitation of living things, deforestation… the comic strip is also interested in the major issues facing today’s society. Proof that she has definitively left the world of childhood to reach adulthood…