The creative couple formed by Javier Olivares (Madrid, 1964) and Jorge Carrión (Tarragona, 1976) functions at this point as a single perfectly oiled mind. They have found in their interest in the world of literature and creation an almost total harmony, which has already been reflected in works such as Shakespeare & Cervantes (Nordica, 2018) and Warburg & Beach (Salamandra Graphic, 2021). In that accordion-format comic, a diptych that addressed the figures of Sylvia Beach and Aby Warburg, there was already, in some way, the seed of the following book: Samuel & Beckett (Salamandra Graphic, 2024), an exploration of the figure of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, known above all for Waiting for Godot (1952) but a much broader work, dominated by minimalism and a vital pessimism not without humor.
In conversation with this newspaper, cartoonist and screenwriter explain their interest in a figure that still seems relevant to them today. “It seems to me to be an example, like those of James Joyce, Paul Celan, Juan Ramón Jiménez or Clarice Lispector, of how far language and literature can be taken through risk,” explains Carrión. “It is an avant-garde model, that is, working on the front line, under the hail of bullets from the enemy army, in the open, between trenches. “I don’t understand art and narrative without the idea of a laboratory and a game, but a game in which you really play.”
Javier Olivares, for his part, recognizes Beckett’s influence on his career. “At the end of the 80s I was fascinated by the character of Beckett. Read Pavesas, first love, Eleutheria… seven or eight books,” he says. “He left a certain mark on me, in some way I share his search for the essential and the minimum. I hadn’t read it since then, and returning to it has been like doing an autopsy of my work,” confesses the illustrator. Carrión is aware that he is a writer “better known than read,” but his work survives in that of other authors, such as “JM Coetzee, one of his disciples.” “Waiting for Godot It continues to be performed in theaters around the world, because it continues to challenge us, it continues to speak to us about the absurdity of our lives, about our own inclement conditions,” he adds.
In Beckett’s work, humor is also very important, as Olivares emphasizes, who qualifies his supposed pessimism: “It is a quantum optimism. He always talked about that millimeter just before falling off the cliff, that space in which you can still move forward.” And his best-known phrase—and misinterpreted by coaches—stands out: “Fail again. Fail better.”
After their two previous collaborations, this unofficial closing of the trilogy needed a twist, in Carrión’s opinion. “I came up with the idea of doing, in parallel, a biography and an artistic retrospective. From that concept the structure of the project was born,” details the author of Against Amazon (2019). “On the one hand,” he continues, “a documentary story that tells the life of a human being (his family, his loves, his crises, his achievements, his encounters with Joyce or Jung or Buster Keaton); and, on the other, the visual interpretation of his most representative works. The title was obvious, if you knew how to listen to the concept and the materials.”
Complicating life
From that idea, Carrión develops a script sui generis“more artistic than technical.” About him, Olivares makes a storyboard which they then both discuss, until they have something more closed, from which the artist can work. “He decides the resources, the color palette, he always gets it right,” says Carrión, “and I change dialogues and texts in the final version. He contributes many script ideas and I also try to contribute graphic ideas. It is a conversation in which egos do not matter, the result matters, making it the best possible. And that it is something that had not been done yet.” Olivares explains that they have tried to tell many things only with the image. “It is a very Beckettian book, very concise and essential. We have taken Beckett’s idea of filing things down to the minimum, a territory in which I have always liked to work: that place where, if you put something extra, it is left over, and if you remove it, it is not understand”, develops the cartoonist.
As is usually the case with the man from Madrid, in this new comic he has tried to do something he had never done before. “Complicating my life is a hallmark that I have been carrying since the 80s,” he admits. “I have always moved like a sniper. I like to listen to each book and go where it wants to take me,” he says. However, Warburg & Beach and Samuel & Beckett They have many points in common, not only because of the presence of characters like Sylvia Beach or James Joyce, but because Olivares found in him solutions close to the collage which he then continued to explore in the comic about Beckett.
The graphic stable company
Samuel & Beckett It is divided into two parts that intersperse; Samuel He deals with the person and uses his own words and those of people who knew him, “practically everything is discussed,” the authors say. Beckett He deals with the works, with his unique creative universe. To do this, Olivares was clear that he could not try to summarize each work: “it would have been daring,” he says. “They were very different from each other, from theater to sound pieces, through letters and stories,” describes the cartoonist of anger (2020). “Jorge gave me some keys to each one, so that I could interpret them. My first idea was to treat each one with a different technique, but I ruled it out because it would have made the whole thing very complex,” he explains.
Thus, the illustrator came to an original solution, consisting of creating the equivalent of a theater company, with two actors, two actresses and a few set elements, pieces that would serve to compose each image as a collage. “At the beginning of my career, I thought of myself as a film director, and I talked in terms of shots and cameras. But, as the years go by, I tend to see myself more as a theater director with very little money. And that was the key to the idea of putting together a theater company with limited resources, which has to represent all of Beckett’s works. In the manner of Peter Brook, who also limited the theatrical paraphernalia and sought that kind of primordial nudity,” Olivares develops.
The double pages starring what the authors call “Graphic Stable Company” would be perfect conceptual posters for the works of Samuel Beckett: “the images are symbolic, they mean exactly what is seen. They are a gateway to the works, an invitation to read them.” Certainly, the work of Olivares and Carrión invites you to immerse yourself in the life and work of some of the most original creators of the 20th century, but, far from the typical descriptive biographies, the book is also an entirely personal comic, with its own vision. and an original approach: although Carrión barely puts his own words on the pages, his thesis is in his choices. The drawing of Olivares in the best moment of his career does the rest.
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