Sculptures and paintings that leave their supports, come to life and discuss once the doors of the Musée d’Orsay have closed: this is what the author and designer Christophe Chabouté imagined in his graphic novel, Musée, which appears this Wednesday, April 19.
In 192 pages of a book drawn in black and white (ed. Vents d’Ouest), the author offers a “slow-paced wandering”, at night, at the Musée d’Orsay. Once the visitors have left, Manet’s Olympia, which spends its life lying down, leaves its bed, Gustave Caillebotte’s Les Raboteurs de parquet, tired, go to stretch their legs, while Antoine Bourdelle’s statue of Herakles directs towards the toilets, of which he explores all the aspects and accessories without understanding them.
Berthe Morisot, in love with a dog walker, observes this character every evening through the window while a sculpture regularly argues with a woman painted by Modigliani, while other characters, in love, spend the night chatting or that François Pompon’s white bear leaves its pose to go to sleep. “It simply tells what the watched say of the viewers, what the paintings and sculptures tell of what they see,” explains the author to AFP.
The idea was born “in front of the small sculptures of parliamentarians” by caricaturist Honoré Daumier in Orsay, “which I had never seen. I felt like they were whispering to each other and saying things every time I left the room,” he says. “I went back there four or five years ago and I had the same impression. I left with 3000 photos, lots of sketches and I started writing on the train,” he adds.
The work includes few texts, which is somewhat the “trademark” of this prolific author who published his first plates with Vents d’Ouest in Récits in 1993, a collective album on Rimbaud. “It’s the interest of comics, what you can’t write, you can draw it and I prefer to tell in images rather than in text”, he says. This time, “I wanted to tell pretty things more than accidents of life or problems”, he adds, speaking of a story with a “lighter” theme than those addressed in his previous ones. works.
Following the common thread that runs through all his work, Christophe Chabouté tries to highlight “everyday life, the little things, what does not seem important and yet is the most important, the little things that we do not look at more because we have seen them too much,” he said. “We are saturated with images that move quickly. There, on the contrary, it is a distilled time, a little slow, in which one walks slowly, ”adds this admirer of the director Jacques Tati. The wandering continues from sequence to sequence, without an action scene. “The only fast character is a running dog”, underlines the author who would like his graphic novel to encourage his readers to go to the Musée d’Orsay “to listen and feel the works” by “opening” their imagination.
Museum, Christophe Chabouté, Winds of the West, 23 euros.
