“Neither writer nor artist. To me, this indecisiveness is wonderfully fruitful, infallibly guiding one off the beaten track. I am not fiercely drawn to society, and my work is not driven by a will to reign there. […] I have no taste for domination and, amidst the hustle and bustle, I thoroughly avoid to let demagogy tint the ink I draw with. I eschew any kind of strategy and strive for indeterminate goals. I sometimes picture myself as a crooked tree, an image I’ve grown accustomed to. I was asked, when drafting these lines, to specifically write about Drawing. This is not an easy task, for the idiosyncrasy and merit of drawing is precisely, as anyone who practices it will know, its imperviousness to characterization. It is crucial to preserve the unexplained, the unsaid, as the enticing idea of defining and naming narrows the scope of what the draughtsman attempts to convey.”

For his first solo show at the gallery, Blutch, Alsatian draughtsman and comic book author presents a “mish-mash“ of drawings or, better yet, Mish-Mash Drawings. Mish-mash probably originates from the Yiddish word Mishn, referring to a mix of things that do not belong together or that, when associated, create a dissonance. A mish-mash could be compared to the white noise of indistinguishable chatter: “in the streets, for example, I am always overwhelmed by people. I have trouble ignoring things and that tires me sometimes. All my work comes from what I see and hear. We usually refer to the eye when thinking about drawing, but the eye shouldn’t be dissociated from the ear.”

Blutch draws everything, all the time, always, from decency all the way to perversion, with a touch of cruelty and irony. With a sense of childhood candor as well, the candor of drawings made without purpose or ambition. Sometimes Blutch feels like his practice could be “asphyxiated by the rules of comic book literature.” The term draughtsman suits him best, because drawing goes beyond words – a free, untranslatable, abundant mish-mash. Blutch “fights for drawing to stay moving, unstable, vivid and close to its subject.” But what is the subject exactly? Not unlike Yiddish – a mix between German, Hebrew and slavic words – or the multiple dialects that make up Alsatian, Blutch mingles references, inspired as much by paintings as by jazz or cinema. Everything is condensed in his art. “If we were to lay down all of my work on the ground, in chronological order, all the drawings, all the comic strips, we would see my life in a nutshell […].” This mish-mash could be a way of understanding a corpus – or rather, a permanent indecision: these jumbled drawings, as Blutch explains, act as an “emotional diary.”

Agate Bortolussi