Exhibition in photos: Christophe Blain at the 49th Angoulême International Comics Festival

 Christophe Blain, dessiner le temps. Sonia Déchamps, Antoine Guillot and Jean-Baptiste Barbier. Angoulème. Vaisseau Moebius. 17-20 March 2022.

Twice the winner for Best Album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival (2002 for the first volume of Isaac le pirate; 2013 for the second volume of Quai d'Orsay), Christophe Blain was honored with a major retrospective that framed the body of his comics work through the lens of his own cinephilia. The presentation of the exhibition within a large darkened set of rooms invoked the space of the cinema theatre, and the whole thing even ended in a rounded room that displayed his film poster work on its walls while a screen hanging down from the middle of the ceiling projected a 5 minute interview clip showing Blain speaking about some of his fetish films and their influence in his work. 

Blain's visual virtuosity with his brush and pen and inks is on fine display here. The exhibition is packed with a surplus of original pages, including a large number of preparatory sketches, that were all individually accompanied by the artist's own commentary. Everything about the exhibition, from its scenography to the non-chronological organization of Blain's work to the flow of the text and the commentary, teased out the wide extent to which Blain's cinema obsession informs almost every aspect of his comics. Some references are quite obvious, such as his clear love of the Western genre and its visual and narrative codes, but some revelations offered some new avenues of appreciation such as his admission of how the French dubbed soundtracks of many of the Hollywood films of the 1950s-60s play a major role in how he treats the rhythm and tenor of his dialogue.

As a cinephile myself, I greatly appreciated this opportunity to recontemplate Blain's comics and how he treads the intersection of bande dessinée and cinema. Antoine Guillot's intelligent framing and guiding narration through the exhibition does an excellent job of highlighting aspects of Blain's work in both a cinema and bande dessinée context. All of this work is not in vain as the wonderful catalogue collects and reprints almost the entirety of the exhibition: all the original artwork, all of Guillot's text and also all of Blain's commentary - only the collection of sketches is missing. 

-Nick Nguyen

All photos taken by Nick Nguyen

Photos are organized in an attempt to present a visual chronology of the exhibition installation as experienced in a sequential walkthrough.