I am trying to build books that I want to see [+]

Antoine Orand transforms “beautiful ideas into melodies” through drawing. Antoine Orand utilises drawing as a way to record his surroundings. He observes abstracted shapes in his line of sight, plotting them with a thin black line then prescribing bold colours to the composition, often through Risograph printing. Based between Brussels, Belgium and Marseille, Antoine does not consider himself an illustrator “because I don’t really see what I am illustrating” he tells It’s Nice That. “For now, I am drawing,” he continues on his visually intuitive practice, “I am trying to build books that I want to see. I don’t want to communicate as I don’t have enough to say.” Recently exhibiting three new publications at LA Art Book Fair last month, Antoine’s latest works explore the monopoly of manufactured objects in our daily lives. Claires Fontaines, Sabre and Alterego document Antoine’s latest interpretations on the matter through flat and colourful drawings. Influenced by Robert Smithson’s texts such as A Tour of the Monuments and New Jersey, Antoine’s latest output marks a pointed shift towards the realms of sci-fi, leaving behind a past drawing style that was more descriptive in its nature. In Sabre, published by Mega Press, the French artist documents a series of visual experiments. Reminiscent of industrial technical drawings, Antoine’s compositions encapsulate European packaging design with populist illustration. With this unique aesthetic, Antoine confronts his environment, intuitively recording certain aspects of his daily endeavours on paper which he then organises and curates. “I want to (and still want to) capture the bigger picture,” says Antoine “but I know the world is too big for me and so I have to compartmentalise it through drawing.” It’s Antoine’s own way of processing the world around him and a sort of enforced strategy so he does not “drown completely”. He starts with the most simple forms to draw which are “less complex and sensible” for the artist to jot down. “Someday, I expect nature will come back into my work when I feel I can draw it. Right now, I’m only able to draw the human figure in a caricaturist’s way: cruel, sexual and as pathetic figures.” Ultimately intending to create books that do not exist at the moment, Antoine’s goal is to invoke synaesthesia with his books. By hearing colour or seeing a song within the composition of his work, the French creative hopes he can transform the most beautiful of ideas into a melody. [-]

Artist Antoine Orand explores his chaotic side through collage [+]

Artist Antoine Orand explores his chaotic side through collage. We wrote about Antoine Orand’s work last year, when the illustrator was busy making “poppy” comic illustrations under the moniker Claires Fontaines. Now, the artist, who is based between Brussels and Paris, has started working a new direction under the name Tas. Where Antoine’s Claires Fontaines work is linear, logical and slick, under his Tas (which means “stacks”) aesthetic, he rips up his own rule book. Pasting together his neatly executed illustrations with scraps of tap and daubs of brightly coloured paint, the effect is one of playful chaos. “After my last comics attempt, Claires Fontaines,” Antoine tells us, "I felt the need to focus on the exhibition format, and it led specifically to the question of painting. Basically my practice was based on drawing, mainly of usual objects around me. The question was, how could I relate these drawings to the practice of painting? Tas collages are parts of that question. I am following a specific method: in the painting process, I consider a drawing not as a piece of art in itself, but as a material I have to manipulate. In that perspective, drawings become a kind of clay. I stack them, paint on them, cut, redraw, combine them, all these actions building something I ignore before finishing it. Then I use these collages as shapes that I paint on canvas, where I apply directly the same method of combination. This practice is mainly focused on the “make”, avoiding a “too quickly found” finality. “In that way, I think I may go further than what I could properly expect, so these Tas collages are both a part of the chain that leads me to paint, and elements containing the whole process of combination in itself. On the other hand, considered as a digital space, Tas is a visual archive fixing these collages in a specific time. Most of them already disappeared into new combinations that may occur on Tas. It is a stream of attempts that no longer exist anywhere else.” Antoine recently exhibited his work at Entercourse of the new age, a Parisian project which brought artists, photographers, graphic designers and illustrators together to create vinyl cover designs for rare 80s and 90s LPs. “For now, beside the publications that will come up with different publishers ― Gloria Glitzer, Rollo Press and Gargarismes ― I plan to exhibit my current practice of painting. The first event will be an exhibition with a friend of mine, Mario Picardo, in the Parisian gallery P38 in April.” [-]

Antoine Orand explores novel ways to signify space-time and movement by transfiguring not the objects inside it, but the panel [+]

FRENCH ABSTRACT FORMALIST COMICS (FRENCH STRUCTURAL COMICS): AN ARTISTIC MOVEMENT In the mid-2010s, a group of young French artists began creating wordless comics with geometric and minimalist style and little or no narrative. What they show instead is more of a “process”. The emotionless and mechanical style and lack of narrative and words lead the reader to focus on the formal qualities and abstract concepts of comics, visual art, and printed media, such as space-time, movement, body, sign, texture, representation, transformation, repetition/difference, etc. I call this new budding movement French Abstract Formalist Comics. They are “Abstract” Formalist comics not because they do not show representational images —they do, and this is a critical difference between them and Abstract Comics— but because they show abstract narrative and study abstract and formalist themes, concepts, and motives. They could also be called French Structural Comics, because they are similar to works of Structural Cinema such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1968). They share a physical environment, geography, and period; artistic forms (style, aesthetics of comics); themes and motives; and formal as well as the structural features of comics, printed media, and visual art. They also share a community and platform. The prime example is the anthology Lagon, edited by Alexis Beauclair, Jean-Philippe Bretin, Bettina Henni, and Sammy Stein, all of whom are French Structural Comics artists, though not every work in Lagon is Structural Comics. (For example, Simon Hanselman was in it). Éditions Matière, which has had the seminal influence on the development of the movement, publishes many FSC. [...] Antoine Orand explores novel ways to signify space-time and movement by transfiguring not the objects inside it, but the panel, the space-time itself, as the action unfolds. This is most conspicuous in Relatives (2016) and Sebastien (2017). In Orand's How We Met (2016), a panel moves across the page while the image inside the panel doesn’t change much. How We (the two characters) Met? Space-time itself (panel) moved. The world made us meet. It's a “moving” love story. [...] [-]