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 cartoons, 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. stumbled upon since Chris Ware or Ben Katchor. The man who these days visits Malaga and Seville invited by the Andalusian Agency of Cultural Institutions of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, three-day beard, shy look, comes with a new work under his arm, Flamenco Sundaypublished in Spain, like the previous ones, by Fulgencio Pimentel.
Although he is originally from a country with a gigantic tradition of comics, Schrauwen assures that this fact has not weighed as much on his vocation as the environment in which he grew up. “For young people of my generation, all that splendor of Belgian comics belongs to the past,” he says. “In my case, the fact that my father was a great comics collector was more decisive. “If I had belonged to another family, maybe it would have been different for me.”
The truth is that, from its first titles, like my little one, The man who grew a beard, Mowgli in the mirror either Graysan author called to test, and in his case move, the limits of the genre was revealed. Which does not mean, by the way, that Schrauwen is willing to accept the label of avant-garde. “I don’t think it is. I try to create comics that are accessible to everyone, even those who are not regular readers. Yes, it is true that I always try to find new avenues, but to amuse myself. The boundaries in the creation process are limiting, and I often try to break them, but just for fun.”
The inner bourgeois
On the other hand, compared to comics understood as simple evasion or entertainment, Olivier Schrauwen frequently plays at opening windows to the strangeness, and even to the reader’s discomfort, although always with enormous subtlety. “It is evident that I am not looking for pure entertainment. I try to come to things through my life experience, and do something with them. Kick out the bourgeois? “I wouldn’t say that, I believe that my work consists more of a seduction, even of the bourgeois who lives in me.”
The cartoonist’s work reached one of its peaks with Arsene Schrauwenan amazing recreation of his grandfather’s adventures in the Congo, to continue with the science fiction bordering on the absurd humor of parallel lives and in the degradation of a pirate without the slightest moral support of 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 loneliness, alcohol, drugs and existential boredom, which ends up being a mirror of our time, even beyond the author’s initial intentions. “In this book I have tried to be specific with the place, a small area of Belgium, and exact with the dates, the fall of 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 has ended up being darker than I imagined.”
Like so many other cartoon artists, Olivier Schrauwen makes a living combining personal projects with other related jobs, such as animation, although he has never yet decided to take his comics to that field. “I think my books are very specific, I have never wanted to make them into a film, although I am currently trying to make a mix of animation and normal film that has a specific relationship with that 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, the way of telling those stories.”
A robotic character
Another of the spectrums in which the flamenco artist moves is the musical, something that is more related to drawing comics than one might think. “I spend a lot of time researching, looking at computer programs with many lines, melodic fragments, and thinking about how to organize them. And I also make my comics that way, I work with different layers and approach it abstractly, I never make a literal development.”
When asked what he is reading at the moment, he states that he is absorbed in María Medem’s books. “Since I was coming to Spain, I wanted to see things that are done here, and I really like María’s work, as in general everything that our publisher, Fulgencio Pimentel, publishes,” he asserts. “When I was young, hardly anything was known about what was done in Spanish comics, but little by little it is becoming better known, partly thanks to the Graf of Barcelona, which I would say attracts an audience profile similar to that of Flanders. Today the young people of my country are more familiar with the production of this area.”
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 am I not worried about it at all, but I find it fun. I even hope that it can help me with superficial or more mechanical work, such as coloring. I’ve been watching some 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 embracing technology.”
Looked at closely, a work like Arsene Schrauwen Only he could have done it. Or can you imagine a machine producing it? “Not creating,” he laughs. “The main character is very robotic, huh? “Who knows, who knows.”
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