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“Magritte: This is Not a Biography”

By | January 15th, 2018
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

How do you go about trying to understand a surreal mind? How do you explore a body of work and a life that purposefully highlights contradictions and runs from conventional narratives of understanding? For artist Thomas Campi and writer Vincent Zabus, exploring the life and work of Surrealist painter René Magritte means looking through the eyes of a fictional character, forced into the strange world of Magritte, and whose only hope to find a way back to normalcy is by understanding Magritte’s world.

Cover by Thomas Campi

Written by Vincent Zabus
Illustrated by Thomas Campi

Giddied by the prospect of promotion, Charles Singulier makes the whimsical decision to buy a bowler hat. It is a satisfying purchase, but there’s a problem: this particular hat once belonged to the Surrealist painter René Magritte, and by donning it Charles has unwittingly entered the artist’s unbridled, off-kilter world. The choice is clear: uncover the secrets of Magritte’s life and work – or be doomed to wear the hat forever.

Charles embarks on an exploration of Magritte’s imaginative landscape, examining the ideas and penetrating the mysteries of a paradoxical figure: a painter who didn’t like to paint; an instinctive anarchist who lived a suburban, petty bourgeois existence; a lonely, melancholy soul never far from his friends and collaborators.

Magritte: This is not a Biography paints a panoramic and revealing portrait of the great Surrealist, employing a playfulness and wit reminiscent of Magritte himself.

René Magritte was a Belgian surrealist painter in the early twentieth century. As with much surrealism, Magritte’s work took parts of the ordinary and recontextualised them to force observers to reconsider their preconceptions of those objects. Similarly, “Magritte: This is not a Biography” takes an ordinary person, Charles, and throws him into a world unfamiliar to him, forcing him to reconsider his presumptions and goals. We learn about Magritte with Charles, as he tumbles through recreations of Magritte’s paintings.

Charles makes for a strange protagonist. He only really makes two decisions in the book, the first of which is buying a hat, which happens on page one and is the trigger for the story. For the most part Charles is passively wandering through bizarre Magritte-esque settings, as he finds out about Magritte from a series of guides. Charles is a blank cypher, just a way in to be able to explore Magritte.

These guides generally just appear out of nowhere, with very little context, other than when Magritte briefly takes this role, they remain nameless. Even the Magritte expert who Charles meets before falling entirely into Magritte’s dreamworld, and who is a seeming love interest, goes unnamed. These guides’ dialogue sometimes blends together a bit, it is quite essayistic, explaining things about Magritte directly to Charles and to us. Just as Charles is mostly blank, these guides cannot be fully formed people, they are Zabus & Campi’s route to Magritte.

But of course, they could never be people. This is not a book about people. This is not a book even about Magritte. This is not a book made up of paintings. C’est ne pas un pipe. The imagery is treacherous. This is not a biography, but it is reproduction of Campi’s images, that themselves feature reproductions of René Magritte’s images. In the metatext of “Magritte: This is not a Biography,” perhaps there is some justification for a lack of character depth. By not giving these characters enriched depth, by not pretending they’re people, there is an acknowledgment of their purpose to this book.

Normally, I would feel disappointed with a book that gave its characters so little development, but it took me a day or so after finishing to realise how underdevelopment they were, it was still a somewhat satisfying enough read with these shallow cypher characters. I’m not sure whether “Magritte” would benefit from a deepening of Charles or if that would spoil the metatext. Ultimately, as a book, its purpose is to explore Magritte, so does it matter if Zabus & Campi don’t explore their invented way in?

In order to explore Magritte’s work, Zabus & Campi have to depict those classic paintings within this graphic novel. Campi does this really well, he takes the imagery of Magritte’s paintings and integrates them into his own style. It probably helps that Campi considers Magritte and surrealism a key influence in his approach to art anyway. The touchstones between Campi’s style and Magritte’s were already there. Campi has a lovely, painterly style that has both a certain stillness and an energy. Movement is organic and flowing but there is no movement in still images.

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At moments, Campi & Zabus also build on the surreal style and take the formal conventions of comics and play around a little. They play with panel borders and they play with transitions between panels. They play with lettering, like when we meet one character who is absurdly small, his speech bubble corresponds to his size, so Charles says, ‘I can’t hear you, the font is too small.’ Very direct acknowledgements of form and convention can defamiliarize in surreal ways.

First published in France in 2016, this new English translation is part of SelfMadeHero’s Art Masters series, which is made up of graphic novels that explore the lives and works of famous artists. Along with Magritte, there are ones on Picasso, Van Gogh, Dalí, and more. Comics allow for a different kind of exploration of these greats than the traditional prose biography does. By adding the visual element, creators can respond to the art of their subjects, it makes it more of a dialogue than a dry reciting of a life.

“Magritte: This is not a Biography” takes the work of René Magritte and creates its own work of surrealism that is fun and engaging and taught me things about Magritte. However, as a work of fiction, its characters don’t really stand on their own, and the dramatic drive of the story is unclear. But maybe that doesn’t really matter when the point is to explore Magritte. I’m not sure. At one point in the book, we’re told that Magritte hated psychoanalysis because it took away the mystery, and he wanted to celebrate and revel in the mystery of life and the mind. So, maybe it’s okay that these characters are unclear. Maybe that’s part of the mystery of art, life and Magritte.


Edward Haynes

Edward Haynes is a writer of comics, fiction, and criticism. Their writing has been featured in Ellipsis, Multiversity, Bido Lito!, and PanelxPanel. They created the comic Drift with Martyn Lorbiecki. They live in Liverpool, where they hornily tweet for your likes and RTs @teddyhaynes

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